Invisible Agency. 2019.
This artwork represents the monitored landscape, the noise of the invisible virtual and connected space in which we are all enmeshed. This digital artwork monitors discreet data packages from all the Wifi Signals in range of the artwork to create a visual response inside the electronic artwork. The aesthetic experience facilitates a new understanding of the networked data space and the surrounding landscape of data, information, and stacked systems. Anyone within a one mile range of the artwork with a phone or wifi signal (people buses trains etc) triggers the singing in the artwork.
In other words everyone near the artwork or within a one mile range of the artwork is participating in the the artwork and the 'noise' of what you see. The data is poetically interpreted and formed into a responsive generative new media artwork It therefore by default becomes a public participatory artwork.
We are implicitly related to the data in the wider network within the environment by our own mobility. The liquid flows of the binary world can be evidenced from numerous fixed invisible devices that are now everywhere. WiFi signals acts to integrate the body into the wider technological landscape. The ‘body’ is invested inside the ‘data space’ by the multiple devices we carry and connect to these wider stacked networks. We are now complicit in this monitored relationship and by default we enter into a dialectic with all of these other devices via beacons and other monitoring systems.
The artwork created raises several questions about the fluid liquid real time data space that now surrounds and envelops us everywhere. Who owns the data, who does this space belongs to? What is the future of this technologically stacked interlocking mediated environment?
Technical. Made with custom electronics. This screen based visualisation changes in response to the WiFi activity in range which is presented onto a flat surface of what looks like a map.
Size. 120 by 100 cm. Hangs on wall. Self contained. Mixed media. Oil, Canvas, Electronics, Cables, Leds, Screens, Software.
Context. How do we see all the flowing fluid information that is all around us?
Exhibition.
Heinz Nixdorf Museum Germany 2023
Javevenpaa Art Museum Finland. 2021
Vertigo STARTS at Centquatre Paris. 2019
Available for touring and exhibitions.