Colour Wifi

Abstract

Public and commercial Wi-Fi hotspots and private Wi-Fi access point distribute in whole cities especially metropolitan cities, such as London, New York and Hong Kong. Wi-Fi landscapes affect human’s habit and route of access cyberspace in physical world. For example, People can access Internet in Hong Kong metro stations and public parks. At the same time, human can continue their online social life in ubiquitous Wi-Fi distribution. Wi-Fi is becoming one type of common wealth and it is the complex of political, economic, technological, cultural and geographical factors. Because Wi-Fi access points entail above social relations, they are the important object to identify and depict Wi-Fi user’s behaviour (how uses and where) and subjectivity (who is able to use). In advance, Wi-Fi users are equipped with Wi-Fi device to access Wi-Fi access points to live in the Internet, so they become the hybrid of machine and human - cyborg (cybernetic organism). 

Cyborgs form a particular Manuel DeLanda's assemblage which is composed of members with the same or similar behaviour and capacity not their common properties.  Wi-Fi is the obvious example for assemblage. Popular city-wide Wi-Fi in metropolitan cities provides citizens travel in cities and can access Internet as they stay at home. Wi-Fi users travel among different hotspots via their physical behaviour and their routes bring their cyber life among the hotspots to different users' online activities to particular places such as cafe or companies. In particular Wi-Fi hotspots, they can see others use Wi-Fi to cover online and offline world then they share the experience to create their own assemblages in deterritorialized geographical territory. To depict this phenomena, this project visualise Wi-Fi access points, the important object, as house.

 House is one of main issue in anthropology to study kinship and identity. The concept of “house society” was applied by Claude Levi-Strauss to look for the elementary...