“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.” - Adam Greenfield, 2009
As the end of the year approaches and we try to make sense of exactly what it was that went down in 2011, I thought I’d share one of my personal favorites from a few months back. Immaterials was created by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen. The clever LED device they constructed picks up WiFi signals throughout the city of Oslo and allows, with the use of timelapse photography, a glimpse of the modern city’s invisible networks.
The conceptual framework for the project comes via Adam Greenfield, who developed a similar technique to visualize RFID fields in 2009.
