project title
WiFiKu
project description
The proliferation of pockets of WiFi 802.11 activity has created a world of barely visible lexical whimsy. I am referring to the SSID names that people must assign to their WiFi nodes. These names are ripe fruit for Psychogeographic exploration, exploitation, and map making.
Where I sit writing this email I see the names of three WiFi nodes from my AirPort control panel: "gina-network -- piss off"; "jeppyland"; "my girlfriend can snowboard". Individually they are ambiguous nuggets that might start a longer narrative, one that investest anonymous, invisible radio waves with a lived quality that is about some living, breathing experiences.
For Psy.Geo.Conflux I will lead a drift of some New York City neighborhoods. Our tour will be of the names people give to their WiFi nodes, and we will be constructing haiku using the SSID names that we find on our ramble.
Each haiku will be composed once 17 syllables have been gathered. Since WiFi nodes can bleed into each other, the order in which we find the nodes, or in which they are listed by our software, won't be considered. It is only sufficient that we gather enough SSID names containing in total 17 syllables to construct a haiku. From this pool of names, we may order them as we see fit. SSID names must remain whole, though; it is a violation to break a name up. If a name contains too many syllables to complete the current haiku, it will be used for the next haiku and another SSID name in the area must be found to make the current haiku complete.
Once a haiku is properly formed, we will mark on a street map the area in which we walked in order to gather the necessary syllables for the haiku. We will then begin to construct the next haiku, and so forth.
At the end of our drift, we will have a map of haiku authored anonymously and unwittingly by the WiFi denizens of New York City. It is my goal to produce from this a well-designed map that marks geographic space with the sentiment and sensibility of the haikus that we harvest as we go along our walk.
name
Julian Bleecker
location
New York, New York
profile
Julian Bleecker has long been involved in technology design, both the development work involved in building mobile and networked systems, and in his work to produce provocative human-machine entanglements.
As an art technologist, he is involved in several projects. PDPal, a collaboration with Marina Zurkow and Scott Paterson, is a psychogeography mapping project for the web and Palm PDA devices that allows maps to be created and shared based on experiential coordinates rather than the conventional coordinates of latitude/longitude and street addresses. PDPal is installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, and Times Square in New York City. Another of his collaborations with Zurkow is Pussy Weevil, a reactive screen-based character that responds to the actions of its audience. Pussy Weevil is a Tex Avery inspired character that is evocative of the sometimes puerile threats of a misbehaving house pet. This project has been installed in New York City and Cambridge, MA, and is currently installed at the American Museum of the Moving Image. He is an Engineer-in-Residence at Eyebeam Atelier, where he is producing a toolkit of WiFi technology specifically designed for art-technology projects.
He is also a professional technology consultant, providing expertise in implementation and concept development for networked, wireless, and mobile systems for MTV and VH1.
He is on the faculty of the Design and Technology Department at Parsons School of Design and writes and lectures on technology and culture. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an MS in Engineering (Computer-Human Interaction) from the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness Board of Studies. His dissertation concerns the meaning-making apparatus of technology as culture.
