Wi-Fi Straitjacket
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Constraint City - The Pain of Everyday Life lets you literally, feel this pain of information society. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset gets.
The fetishistic garment, created by Gordan Savicic, is equipped with servo motors and a WIFI-enabled Nintendo DS. Electromagnetic waves are controlling the chest strap, shaping their invisible architecture directly onto the body. Daily walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a "pain-map" which is fetched from GoogleMaps servers with automated scripts. The map keeps tracks of the wireless networks along the route, but also of the wearer's détours when entering a very dense network place. The technique, which the artist calls Inverse War-Driving, challenges the discourse about locative and wearable media. Constraint City: The Pain of Everyday Life is one of the nominees for the Transmediale award. Via neural. |
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I think that, besides everything you say, this piece although shows the communication access disparity between rich and dense areas (like Manhattan) and poor areas (like Burundi for instance). It somehowreflexes a part of geopolitical organisation in the world... I don't know if the artist wanted to explore this issues but I thought on that by the time I saw your post...
I'd like to see some of those maps. The next step would be to make entering a wireless hot zone pleasurable and to install it on sensitive areas of the users skin.
Reminds me of the Painstation from a few years back.
I also had visions of wearing this suit walking from my apartment in Boyle Heights down the 1st. St. Bridge to my death in the Arts District, since wifi in Boyle Heights is almost scarce but at the end of the bridge wi-fi is rampant.
Id love to try.