In Wifi.Bedouin, "the concept of inserting wireless signals into unexpected places – and thereby suggesting new ways of thinking about the world – has been updated for the 21st century. The result is a compelling revision of the dominant logic of mobile and pervasive media, emphasizing locality over ubiquity and promoting awareness of the limits of even the most fetishized new technologies.
At the risk of suggesting that, to some extent, the medium of the Wifi.Bedouin provides its own message, Bleecker's device is perhaps best understood as a cognitive tool, a means of creating conceptual and technical possibilities rather than a discrete object unto itself. The Bedouin also merges the ordinarily disparate worlds of the tinkerer-hacker-slasher with that of the academic or cultural investigator. In fact, the Wifi.Bedouin breaks no new technological ground, relying instead on several relatively common digital components that are ingeniously assembled into a self-contained, mobile package. More adventurous users are invited to try their hand at assembling a Bedouin themselves by following the step-by-step instructions in the Wifi.Bedouin DIY guide. For the less technically inclined, Vectors is soliciting project proposals for an ongoing series of field tests in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of both wireless technology and the cultural imaginary it has activated." -- Vectors Journal Editorial Staff
Author's Statement
"WiFi.Bedouin is a wearable, mobile 802.11b node disconnected from the global Internet. It is designed to be functional as well as provocative, expanding the possible meaning and metaphors about access, proximity, wireless and WiFi. This access point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community. It is a deliberate attempt to meaningfully stitch together what are often considered two entirely separate realms 'virtual and physical worlds' into a more cohesive, deliberate, less disjunctive hybrid.
WiFi.Bedouin is a thinking object, a designed and made technical instrument that helps work through the intellectual and material challenges of designing against convention." -- Julian Bleecker, Vectors, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2006
Designer's Statement
"Let's say you're drawing a networking diagram. How would you draw a wired connection between two computers? Probably with a line. You'd draw the line, and you'd understand that it meant information could flow both ways between the two machines.
How would you draw a radio broadcast? Concentric circles or arcs, perhaps? We've seen it a thousand times, and we know that information only travels one way across those curves.
Now, how would you draw a call between wireless phones? You might have to stop and think for a second first. In keeping with the above-mentioned wireless tradition, you might find yourself using concentric circles again, drawing a satellite orbiting the earth as the source of a broadcast enveloping both handsets. But those ripples generally mean one-way communication only, and so they don't seem fully adequate to account for the interactive conversation taking place between the two mobile phone users. So, what else do we draw?
We run into the same conundrum when attempting to represent wireless internet access. It's easy to diagram the broadcast area of a wireless hotspot with some concentric rings, but what about the activity taking place within that hotspot? What do we draw?
Julian Bleecker's WiFi.Bedouin complicates the issue further, by introducing the idea of a mobile WiFi hotspot that can, among other things, intercept and redirect the traffic of web surfers attempting to reach canonical websites. Intrigued by the way in which Julian's approach troubled our normal conceptions of wireless networks, I quickly became interested in the notion that we simply have not yet developed a popular visual vocabulary to adequately describe wireless connectivity — at least not in a way that would shed any light on people's behavior while using these networks. Working out such a vocabulary thus became the major focus of my work on this project, which is humbly offered as a step along the way.
It seemed important from the beginning to visualize wireless connectivity as a space where specific events could occur. WiFi access points thus became sources of this interactive space, and in my early sketches this was represented with cones of light, as if the wireless hotspot functioned like an overhead lamp whose illumination made useful activity possible in a darkened room. While this was a compelling metaphor, in the final analysis it carried too much physical baggage to be of much use. What proved more fruitful was inverting the cones of light, using them instead to carve out 'airspace' above a physical location where network activity could take place. This is what you see in the final design.
There's significant terrain still to be explored in how we represent wireless connectivity visually, and thus how we describe to ourselves the methods we use to communicate and share information. One aspect that I noticed while putting this project together is how seeing the generic figures connecting to specific URLs immediately starts the narrative wheels turning in one's mind, speculating as to what this or that particular person is doing at this or that site. I found this to be a very visceral demonstration of just how much web addresses function for us as verbs, even as Julian's theoretical and technological innovations challenge us to reevaluate the potential meanings of those verbs." -- Erik Loyer, Vectors, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2006
Project Credits
"Thanks to Eyebeam Atelier and Jonah Peretti for supporting the first version of this project through an R&D Residency during 2002-03, and to Christopher Hanson for his valuable assistance in the Mobile and Pervasive Lab. — Julian Bleecker, May 19th, 2008
Julian Bleecker
Author
Julian Bleecker is Director of the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future R&D think tank run by the School of Cinema-TV and Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. He is an Assistant Professor at USC's Interactive Media Division, and research faculty at USCÂ’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. In 2005-06 he held a Research Fellowship at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Bleecker has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell, an MS in Engineering from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz where his dissertation topic was on the linkages between technology, entertainment and culture. His art-technology collaboration with Marina Zurkow titled Pussy Weevil exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2005.
Erik Loyer
Designer Programmer
Erik Loyer's interactive artworks have been exhibited online and in festivals and museums throughout the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Prix Ars Electronica; and Transmediale. Loyer is the creator of The Lair of the Marrow Monkey, one of the first websites to be added to the permanent collection of a major art museum, and Chroma, an award-winning web serial about the racial politics of virtual reality. As Creative Director for Vectors, he has designed numerous multimedia essays in collaboration with leading humanities scholars. Loyer's commercial portfolio includes Clio and One Show Gold Award-winning work for Vodafone as well as projects for BMW and Sony. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, and his works have been honored in the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media and the California Design Biennial. Loyer has a B.A. in Cinema/Television Production from the University of Southern California." -- from Vectors, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2006