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Probing the network: architecturality of wireless infrastructure

Published: 19 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile devices and wireless networks have a prominent place in our interaction with the environment and with each other. Like every new technology, it has been a subject to inflated expectations. Scholars, writers, artists and architects have explored how this new digital layer could reconstitute our experience of the 'real' urban world, reconfigure space and finally, recompose social interactions within it.
In reality although hardly negligible, its impact has not been that spectacular. In this paper, we will outline a set of design and artistic practices attuned at understanding and articulating the interplay of the social, digital and physical infrastructures. These artistic and design artefacts outline a tangible territory of interactions which contributes to our understanding of the physicality of wireless communication and its coexistence within built architecture. Aesthetic experiments, playful interventions and critical designs all conceptualise interaction with an otherwise insensible infrastructure. We will identify common threads in the ways these artworks manipulate the wireless 'material' with a focus on the underlying motivation and resulting outcomes. Based on this, we will discuss these practices in the light of their relevance for and reference to architecture.

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    MAB '14: Proceedings of the 2nd Media Architecture Biennale Conference: World Cities
    November 2014
    110 pages
    ISBN:9781450333023
    DOI:10.1145/2682884
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 19 November 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. infrastructure
    2. interaction
    3. network
    4. spatial experience
    5. wireless

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    • Aarhus University
    • MAI
    MAB '14: Media Architecture Biennale 2014
    November 19 - 22, 2014
    Aarhus, Denmark

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