In 2010, I have my exhibition “Urban Wi-Fi Landscape” in Taipei metro “Jianzicui” station. This exhibition displayed 40 urban Wi-Fi landscape prints in London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong and Taipei.
Around 2005, lots of cities in the world began to implement their municipal Wi-Fi infrastructures and commercial hotspots. In the meantime, Wi-Fi APs (access points) replace traditional wire/ADSL modems in personal houses and public places in metropolis gradually. Wi-Fi is not only innovative technical products but also global phenomena in the first decade of 21 century. This fast-developing and popular urban infrastructures and services attract to me and I want to represent invisible and independent Wi-Fi networks via visual and colourful way mark its multiple attributes, such as material/immaterial, invisible/visible, local/global, private/public, and routes/roots.
I have collected Wi-Fi data in Taipei since 2006 and went to London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong until 2010. I translated unique Wi-Fi’s hardware BSSID (Basic Service Set IDentifier) number into web colour code and sorted the order according to my routes. BSSID is 12-digit code and it consists of two part of numbers. The first 6-digit code is manufacturer’s code and the last 6-digit one is serial number in manufacturer’s factory.
