MAB14

Selena Savic and Teresa Heitor: Probing the network. Architecturality of Wireless Infrastructure

Part of Paper Session 3: Critical Perspectives and Urban Curation

How do wireless signals coexist with the built environment? What impact can it have on our experience of space? Selena Savic and Teresa Heitor look for answers (photo by bobamnertiopsis, Creative Commons)

Abstract: Mobile devices and wireless networks have a prominent place in our interaction with the environment and with each other. Like every new technology, it has been a subject to inflated expectations. Scholars, writers, artists and architects have explored how this new digital layer could reconstitute our experience of the ̳real‘ urban world, reconfigure space and finally, recompose social interactions within it.

In reality although hardly negligible, its impact has not been that spectacular. In this paper, we will outline a set of design and artistic practices attuned at understanding and articulating the interplay of the social, digital and physical infrastructures. These artistic and design artefacts outline a tangible territory of interactions which contributes to our understanding of the physicality of wireless communication and its coexistence within built architecture. Aesthetic experiments, playful interventions and critical designs all conceptualise interaction with an otherwise insensible infrastructure. We will identify common threads in the ways these artworks manipulate the wireless ̳material‘ with a focus on the underlying motivation and resulting outcomes.

Based on this, we will discuss these practices in the light of their relevance for and reference to architecture.

Paper Session 3: Critical Perspectives and Urban Curation
This session takes place in the morning on November 22. It features four talks:

James Miller: Media in Built Environments – the Technologies of Mediatization

Gavin Sade: Aesthetics of Urban Media Façades

Tanya Toft: Situations of Presence – Reclaiming public space in the urban digital gallery

Karolina M. Zielinska-Dabkowska: Critical Perspectives on Media Architecture

Selena Savic and Teresa Heitor: Probing the Network: Architecturality of Wireless Infrastructure