The Artists of Communication

Once the province of universities and R&D labs, technological innovations are now emerging from downtown lofts and galleries, where growing legions of contemporary artists have embraced wireless as their medium of choice. This convergence of wireless and art promises to forever change the ways we interact with the world around us: Not only have wireless technologies eliminated the boundaries and constraints that once limited communications, but physical realities are now fusing with virtual realities. The inanimate has become sentient — walls literally can talk.

Because wireless art is immune to the material requirements and deficiencies of traditional media like sculptures and paintings, it can be presented, transmitted and preserved anywhere. In a sense, both the material and digital worlds are vast museums to stroll and investigate.

And unlike more traditional forms of creative expression, wireless art is too new and too evolutionary to fall prey to narrow definitions of what it does and does not constitute. So far, its sole defining characteristic is a common preoccupation with the complex interactions between humans, urban environments and machines.

In short, like all art, it's about life and how we live it.

Node Runner

Yury Gitman and Carlos Gomez de Llarena are expanding wireless gaming to an entirely new dimension. After being asked to develop a project mapping New York City via wireless, they brainstormed on ideas that would engage users by creating a competitive setting. The result: Node Runner, a kind of Wi-Fi scavenger hunt that plays out across a city's open wireless networks. “We're conforming the city into the playground, like the checkerboard in checkers,” de Llarena said.

The object is simple: Players race to find more open nodes than their opponents within a set amount of time. At each node, they must upload a digital photo back to game headquarters as proof of connectivity.

Node Runner launched in August 2002 as one of a group of projects presented by Eyebeam, a new media arts collective, under the umbrella title “We Love New York: Mapping Manhattan with Artists and Activists.” After getting a crash course in Wi-Fi, players were turned loose with an iBook and a digital camera. Gitman led one team, and the other was headed by warchalking guru Matt Jones. Back at Eyebeam, de Llarena monitored the game's progress by printing out photos and placing them on a huge map on the gallery floor. After a two-hour mad dash through the city, Gitman's team was declared the winner. (“They cheated,” de Llarena cracked.)

Although Gitman and de Llarena have since moved on to solo art projects, they plan to maintain the Node Runner Web site (www.noderunner.com) as an online scoreboard and instructional guide to inspire others to play the game in their own cities. And given current cultural trends, it's not too hard to imagine the idea exploding — anyone for a Node Runner reality game show?

“That kind of commercial element always comes into play — there's also the constant background question of, ‘What is art?’” Gitman said. “But really, it's all about the zeitgeist. We're trying to capture a snapshot of the times.”

34 North 118 West

Sometimes the technology of the future can reconnect us to the past. In late 2002, the team of Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman and Jeremy Hight descended upon downtown Los Angeles' long-abandoned Freight Depot site to introduce “34 North 118 West,” an experiment in what they've dubbed “sonic archaeology in the urban landscape.”

“34 North” marries audio narrative with wireless technology to document the people and places that made up the L.A. of the early 20th century. The project, which is the product of more than a year spent researching old newspapers and books, resurrects a long-vanished world where notions of coast-to-coast infrastructure and high-speed connectivity applied only to the railroad system.

According to Knowlton, he and his colleagues began formulating “34 North 118 West” — so named for L.A.'s latitude and longitude — after proposing to a local museum to create wireless guided tours for its art collections. From there, their basic idea for location-based audio projects began to snowball.

“The challenge we wanted to address was, ‘How can we take the infrastructure and give people an experience that they would like?’” Knowlton said. “The answer was storytelling, which has been around as long as humans have had language. So we thought we would bring these stories into cyberspace.”

Visitors to the Freight Depot site are each loaned a PaceBook tablet PC, a GPS unit and headphones. As participants walk the site, they view a map on the PaceBook screen that moves with them based on their GPS-determined location; pink hot spot icons move across the map, and when an icon reaches the center of the screen, a story begins to play over the headphones. “You hear steam trains, signal crossings — it's an incredible mix of the virtual environment and the real environment,” Knowlton said. And because the stories comprising “34 North” exist in cyberspace, they'll remain accessible to anyone with the right technology for many years to come.

To Knowlton, it's an entirely new kind of interactive experience. “I hate the idea of interaction as we've come to know it. It's all point and click. But now you're no longer confined to the mouse or the desktop — the user is active in the landscape,” he said. “The landscape becomes the interface — and you become the mouse as you walk through the world.”

Creative Time

Within the New York City public arts organization Creative Time, artists are swapping their paintbrushes for PDAs. With its ongoing “Air Time” series, the 30-year-old new media collective has presented a succession of projects exploring how wireless is shattering the conventional boundaries of public and private spaces.

According to Deputy Director and Curator Carol Stakenas, wireless art was a natural evolution of Creative Time's core methodology of introducing site-responsive, time-sensitive and multidisciplinary projects into the public realm.

“We wanted to celebrate and investigate how wireless is enhancing social interaction,” said Stakenas, a self-professed “PDA-obsessed person” who joined Creative Time in 1994. “We want to crack open the public's imagination about how convergent our lives have become — that we're constructing a new kind of fluidity and changing how we move through space and time. We want to convey the idea that a wireless device can be the key to your imagination.”

Future projects include PDPal, an application designed by artists Marina Zurkow, Scott Paterson and Julian Bleecker that lets users map their urban experiences. “It's really reverse GPS — instead of the device telling you where you are, it prompts you to explain where you are,” Stakenas said. “It's pushing the notion of cartography past an exclusively geographical element to imagine a more complete narrative experiment that users can share.”

On April 26, Creative Time will partner with Manhattan's New School for Social Research to launch Open Swap, a wireless swap meet where attendees can share digital artwork, games and applications on their mobile devices.

“What I love about people working in this area is that as much as there are limitations, it's also the beginning of possibility — everybody's learning it as we go along,” Stakenas said. “There's a lot of opportunity for creative misuse.”