Participant observation and data visualisation

Body and duration in digital art are less important than fine art. In fine art, artists used their bodies to create their works in a specific time duration, such as paintings, sculpture or performance art. Digital artists aim to applied machines to produce their works and play the works in a time-specific duration. I tried to bridge the gap via converting the body as a cyborg and move between Wi-Fi networks to perform the concept of moving in the cyberspace and record the movement via my electronic devices to create the visualising Wi-Fi networks as the painters painted what they saw. The different mediums between fine art and digital art should not become the barrier between them, and the combination could help artists to explore the world deeply and widely.

Lisa Jevbratt created a series of works of network visualisation, including 1:1¹, Out of the Ordinary² and The Infome Imager³. She traced the connection between computers and applied colours to indicate the status of website, such as live or not found. Different to Jevbratt's automatic tracing work, Gordan Savicic's "Constraint City"⁴ detected Wi-Fi networks via his walk in the city and the data were written/visualised on his body by his Wi-Fi corset which would become tight when sensing the encrypted Wi-Fi signal then leave scars. Gordan’s work is similar to Stelarc’s prothestic works⁵ which wore machines on their bodies to perform specific behaviours. The main difference between Stelarc and other artists is that Jevbratt and Savicic concerned of the connections in the networks and Stelarc explore the link between human body and machines.

Jevbratt’s data collection is a kind of termiology which categorised different response from IP address or website to a particular position, such as green is accessbile and red means not⁶. This trait also appeared in Savicic’s methodology which distinguish encrypted Wi-Fi networks from the open ones.This kind of knowledge shape their view for the understanding and the visualisation of computer or Wi-Fi networks. For example, scars implied the pain and restricted and green means accessbile like traffic lights. Their methods appeared active attitudes to explore the connections.

Participant observation is the main skill in anthropology’s fieldwork. Anthropologists aim to obtain the native’s point of view so they need to participate in the native’s daily life and observe them. It is not the static observation but an active participation. The observation is reflexive because anthropologists interact with the natives and rethink their understanding of the subject. Compared to the previous collections, participant observation could be alternative to reconsider what we know about the networks and connection. The main challenge will be how we can practice this concept in network data visualisation.

Wi-Fi networks are popular in cities so we are easy to become Wi-Fi natives and tune our behaviours to adapt to this new surroundings. The high density of Wi-Fi access points are like houses and the interaction between Wi-Fi access points are similar to Josef Alber's colour experiments, independent but related.

Constructivists created their architecture with geometric shap, cone, square, circle etc. The principles of Constructivism became the pedagogy of Bauhaus and continued the tradition in US by Josef Ablers.

Besides constructivists, Le Corbusier took houses as "living machine" and built them with the concept of shapes and colours.

Grid is popular in contemporary art, such as Richard Paul Lohse's works. Its importance is powerful, even in invisible John Cage's music. John Cage insisted structure and sound material could be composed independently and he said "nothing about the structure was determined by the materials which were to occur in it ." ⁷ Deborah Campana describe the structures "function as compositional guidelines and are not intended to be actually perceived"⁸ and Morton Feldman had the similar opinions, "an imaginary grid seemed always in operation."⁹. Grid construct the time span and directions, and both of them produce a space to execute the power of the concept.

John Cage's music present the sound material which was produced in our daily life, and noise and silence are equivalent to sound for him. In his famous 4'33", he transform the movement in the space to music according to his rhythmic structure. His works were similar to imitate the nature but in an artistic way. At the same time, the grids appear widely in minimalists' (Donald Judd) and conceptualists' work (Sol LeWitt)..As Picasso removed the trace of the reality after starting his paintings something in the world¹⁰, the grids is the media or way to recreated the object in the real world with its repetitive attributes.

House is an important subject in anthropology's kinship study. Anthropologists studied both physical and conceptual aspects of houses, because kinship is represented in tangible and intangible ways.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1983) considered the house as a social unit after reviewing the confusion of kinship in Franz Boas's study on North American native Kwakiutl. Boas wanted to found the basic social unit according to traditional anthropological terminology, but he failed to locate 'lineage' and 'clan' in Kwakiutl society. He found a native term 'numaym' which involve with the kinship and society and it doesn't fit any traditional categories. Levi-Strauss figured out 'numaym' is house which is comprised of house names, decoration, tangible wealth and blood relationship. The kinship in houses is dynamic with the political and economical activities through the physical and invisible house objects. He coined 'house societies' for this type of societies. His findings inspired the following anthropologists to study the kinship via the process of becoming kinship not being kin.

Modern Houses are not only homes but also a living machine as Le Corbusier mentioned in 1923,

The incredible industrial activity of today, necessarily of great concern to us, puts before our eyes every hour, either directly or through newspapers and magazines, objects of arresting novelty whose whys and wherefores interest, delight, and disconcert us. All these objects of modern life end up creating a certain modern state of mind. We shift our attention with alarm to the old rotten things that are our snail shells, our dwellings, which hold us in their putrid and useless grip every day and offer nothing in return. Everywhere we see machines that serve to produce something and that produce it admirably, with purity. The machine we live in is an old crate of a plane riddled with tuberculosis. We don't bridge the gap between our daily activities at the factory, at the office, at the bank, healthy, useful, and productive, and our familial activity that handicapped at every contour. Everywhere, the family is ruined and minds are demoralized by being tied like slaves to anachronistic things.¹¹

Before Le Corbusier, houses are like artcraft, but he was fascinated with machines and factories and aimed to convert houses to machines. He wanted to change the world via creating houses as mass-production and brought the traditional world to the new order. Although his goal were not achieved but lead us to think what impact of technology affect the concept of houses.

Although Arjun Appadurai didn't mention house societies directly, his global landscape analysis represented media and buildings which are constructed by the modern technology but organized as different ethnoscapes in the global cities. Houses are the popular buildings full of special decorations in modern societies as Le Corbusier’s ‘living machine’ which are shaped by specific ethnic groups as Levi-Strauss pointed out. He emphasized modern societies are not “tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historical unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous” which are similar to house societies in kinship study. House is beyond a territorially bound and cultural homogeneous unit because its members come from different houses and houses are adopted as an identifier by members to locate themselves in social networks and offer people the freedom to go out the physical house to participate the daily life.

Wi-Fi access points could be treated as houses in the modern societies and presents them as living machines via the repetitive grids which were applied in modern houses widely and artists used them to construct relational and rational artworks to construct the world in their ways, such as Donald Judd, Richard Paul Lohse and Josef Albers. Their works escaped from the representational social phenomena but produced new ways to view their world and this is important for this paper to connect Wi-Fi access points to houses with the artistic ways to display the new perspective to the wireless networks.

Most people think the identifier codes of Wi-Fi access points and their distribution are random, but actually they involved with the complicated human behaviours, business modes and urban plans. To depict the phenomena, we should know the composition of Wi-Fi identifier codes(aka MAC address or BSSID). The identifier codes are 12 digits of hexadecimal codes and the first six code is manufacture codes, such as some BTHomeHub access points' manufacturer code is 00147f and it means 'Thomson Telecom Belgium' and the manufacturer code of BT Fusion is 001495 which represents 2Wire, Inc. The last 6 digits are the serial number in the factories. Above all, you can find the codes give us the information about the atlas of Wi-Fi manufacturers in different branches of Wi-Fi market and the business modes constitute of part of Wi-Fi landscapes.

The Wi-Fi distributions in the cities are hierarchical and it means the distribution of a representation of social structure and physical geography. The Wi-Fi maps were available many websites and they offer us the one-way and flat view to see the machines. But Wi-Fi access points immerse in our daily routines and we should focus on the perception and the interaction for Wi-Fi access points to understand the distribution. In the public areas, commercial and government Wi-Fi occupy the spaces and specify the places as "public".

Note:1. http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/index_ng.html2. http://jevbratt.com/out_of_the_ordinary/3. http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/infome_imager/lite/4. http://www.yugo.at/processing/index.php?what=const.... http://stelarc.org/?catID=202396. http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/interface_i/i.... John Cage, "Composition as Process", 198. Form and structure in the music of John Cage, PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1985,25.9. "Crippld Symmetry", Res 2 (Fall 1981):98.10. Quoted in John Richardson, A Lifeof Picasso, Volume 2: 1907–1917. New York: Random House, 1996, p. 175. (http://steviemo.com/ftp/StuKat/Picasso.pdf)11. Le Corbusier, 'Toward An Architecture', translated by John Goodman, p.297, Los Angeles, Calif. : Getty Research Institute.