Mapping the Unseen
The Emergence of [Wireless] Public [Network] Art
By Randall Packer

When the World Wide Web exploded in the early 90s, it became clear that William Gibson's notion of “cyberspace” were becoming an alternate reality for the construction of our dreams and fantasies. Gibson’s poetically described “consensual hallucination” was in fact an otherworldly and sometimes sinister realm, dataspace conceived as distinct and remote from the tangibility of our physical world. As the Web flourished in the late 1990s, we began to see the entire world of commerce, entertainment, education, and publishing ported to this virtual “planet” – a Mcluhanesque “global village” collapsing time and space – accessible only through the illuminated window of the personal computer.

The first generation of Internet art was unabashedly screen-based, enthusiastically exploring the arena of this new digital space, an idealized stage for collective experiences. These works included: the collaboratively constructed texts of Douglas Davis (World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence); the hypermediated fiction of Mark Amerika (Grammatron); the poetically constructed branching narrative of Olia Lialina (My Boyfriend Came Home from the War); Jodi’s deconstructed code (Jodi.org); and the algorithmically composed work of John Simon (Every Icon).

A few artists began to bridge virtuality with physical objects, spatially conceived installations, and the body. These include: Ken Goldberg’s experiment in remote gardening (Telegarden), the interactive, collectively controlled light sculpture of Musaki Fujihata (Light on the Net), and the live networked performance art of Stelarc (Ping Body). Yet for the on-line viewer, the relationship to these works was distant, ephemeral or disconnected all together. The essence of the networked experience was to control an object, event or action at a distance – to be “telepresent,” that is, remote from the location of the work.

In the 21st century, the Gibsonian vision of an artificial reality that we step into, disconnected from the physical world, has been brought back to earth through the increasingly ubiquitous distribution of wireless networks. These networks range from personal systems with a radius of a few hundred feet, to the globalized GPS grid that encircles the earth via 24 orbiting satellites. Liberating bandwidth from cables and wires has brought about a direct relationship between access and location, between virtuality and place. With GPS, we are no longer concerned with the collapse of geographical space; rather, we are now precisely locating ourselves in the physical world. Each wireless network, no matter its size or strength, takes place in a specific location, permeating neighborhoods, streets, people, restaurants, plazas and parks with the invisible pulses of high frequency radio transmission. The virtual and the real find a point of intersection in the wireless network.

"Mapping the Unseen" begins at the point where the on-line embrace of the virtual interacts with the physical quality of the real. At the Power Plant Live! plaza, located in downtown Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where Maryland Art Place (MAP) is located, an antenna transmits bandwidth throughout the area to any computer with a wireless receiver (802.11b). The seven works in this exhibition reflect on the nature of this invisible zone, and how we might interact with the unseen stream of electronic impulses that permeates the plaza’s public space where people come to dine, stroll, converse, and be entertained. The Art & Entertainment Network by Randy Devost and Ilya Mayzus positions the boisterous quality of life in the Inner Harbor at the entrance to MAP, where viewers enter into a contemplative relationship with the experience of art. Tae Lee’s Key to Captivity asks the viewer to free a recently metamorphosized butterfly from a locked cage. The viewer must assume the responsibility of seeking out the instructions on the artist’s site, which reveals the location of the key, hidden in the plaza. Molly Maguire’s Anxiety and Isolation of Communication involves a distraught women caught up in a tormented cell phone breakup with her boyfriend, videotaped near the plaza’s fountain. Viewed “wirelessly” at the site of the conversation, the video superimposes this pre-recorded moment of turmoil over the original location, but with a missing protagonist – a disturbing echo of human disconnect despite increasingly sophisticated communications.

The transformation of communication in increasingly technological times is further investigated by Dan Forsythe’s CU Hear Me, in which two wireless objects transmit either image or sound, not both, so that participating viewer/listeners must invent new forms of dialogue. Dan Halka’s Freedom Technologies & Demographic Distribution is a critique on the “utopian” notion that wireless technologies will magically erase the digital divide. In this age of telecommunications, democratic polling systems are introduced into the critique of art in Chia-Sheng Tai’s Vote your Art, which encourages the on-line audience to vote for their favorite “tomato” artwork. Lastly, James Kafader’s Take One refers back to the roots of “networking,” in which he invites the audience to literally take one of his three cut-out objects to a place far away from Maryland Art Place, far from the wireless network, to a destination up to 50 miles, in an indeterminate relay that seeks three final destinations: Las Vegas, California, and Florida. In Take One, the human network, through collective cooperation, radiates far beyond the electronic one.

We are only beginning to sense the transformations resulting from this integration of the virtual and the real, the co-mingling of digitally constructed places and events with the gravity of earth-bound physics and direct human interaction. With the wireless network, we might not be so concerned with transporting ourselves away from the physical world, but rather, bringing live media: streaming music, the on-line newspaper, and the chat room, or even the quotidian task of email correspondence out of the office and into the park, the plaza, or the café.

So too, the age-old tradition of releasing art from the confines of the gallery or museum, so that cultural transformation can be staged in outdoor public space, is now beginning to take root in the digital medium via the wireless network.