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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tom Schofield
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Whenever we connect to a WiFi network our phone remembers its name, forever. It records our histories of guest WiFi in airports, of hotel rooms, of the houses of our friends or of our workplaces. Our phone contains a history of movements but also leaks those records constantly to other devices listening. Put this together with a huge crowd sourced database of the locations of WiFi network names and it is often possible to guess where we live or at least where we’ve been recently. Everywhere I have never been, except there uses this data to imagine a world where real places are combined on the basis of matching WiFi network names. Using live data from passers-by the work creates hybrid maps based on records found for networks leaked from their phones. The maps twist, mix, contort and combine images of places in the world where the name was found creating weird, hybrid scenes where one place is haunted by the network ghosts of another. The work treats a security vulnerability as an opportunity for the creation of new images and new spatial imaginaries. It takes the power it could assume from technical advantage and rejects it, asking instead what the world would look like, if distance were collapsed and we had been everywhere we’ve never been.
Author(s): Schofield T
Publication type: Digital or Visual Media
Publication status: Published
Year: 2022
Extent of Work: 32 seconds
Publisher: Middlesborough Art Weekender
Place Published:
URL: https://www.tomschofield.net/#/portfolios/EVW
Notes: Also shown at XCOAX 2023 (11th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X 5–7 July Weimar Germany): https://2023.xcoax.org
