Light Painting WiFi Project By Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen And Einar Sneve Martinussen

WiFi networks are an early example of the technological phenomena that makes up the networked city. As new communication standards and pricing models get introduced WiFi may become obsolete, but it is has been one of the first examples of effective ways of bringing the internet into the city. WiFi also have characteristics that illustrate challenges and possibilities posed by networked cities: WiFi is invisible, complex and increasingly mundane.
Adam Greenfield discusses how ‘the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis’. Greenfield argues for unpacking the technologies and systems of the networked city ‘demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them’. The WiFi light-paintings can be situated within the discourses of the networked city as illustrations of how invisible, complex technologies may be contextualised and communicated through visualisation. This is taken up and discussed in a forthcoming book chapter about this work:
"WiFi networks are both physically invisible and technically obscure, which makes them blackboxed on multiple levels. The detailed technical level of the infrastructures, data traffic and electromagnetic fields that our mobile devices are built upon are obviously complex and difficult to understand. However, there are also interactional and material aspects to how we experience these technologies that are similarly opaque and vaguely understood. This material level is especially important for design research as it is not only related to the technical and infrastructural properties of the technologies, but also to how they are experienced as spatial, material and interactive phenomena in the city.