Wireless in the World (2009)
Video, images
An ongoing theme in the practice of Timo Arnall’s Touch project is making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed Lines and Fictional Radio Spaces).
When writing this text, Timo Arnall was sitting near 14 objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Timo Arnall has created communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone, for instance?
Using simple abstractions such as the dashed, Arnall is able to quickly communicate aspects such as the spatial properties of wireless technologies that are often overlooked. These images can be used to sensitise designers and students to the spatial and embodied properties of RFID, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
