Free art piece idea #55
This one is called “Home is where WiFi connects automagically”.
This piece captures the diversity, ingenuity and beauty of WiFi network names and, by extension, of human imagination. When they aren’t just the default name given by the Internet company, WiFi network names can be a unilateral decision made by one of the people living in a shared or solo apartment (In my current place, one of my roommates decided to call our network “Sanchez Internet Fortress” to convey how secure our network was). Wifi names can also be the fruit of several individuals collaborating to find a name and hence conveys the relationship between these individuals and maybe their perception of what they’ve built together.
A community house installed a new WiFi and called it “Unconditional love”. They also left the old, dysfunctional one and renamed it to “conditional love”. Their computers would default to connecting to “conditional love” and they would have to remember to switch and connect to “unconditional love”.
In this piece, the artist will display the names of WiFi networks in different neighborhoods in her city:
- She can either video record her wifi settings screen as she walks the streets and as the names of wifi networks change.
- Or she could simply take a screen shot in different neighborhoods, hence conveying the local quirks and living situations.
It is fascinating how we appropriate every venue for expression however small it is.
