Introduction to Wifi.Bedouin

In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan invokes the image of a Bedouin wandering the remotest deserts by camel, dazzling the natives with media broadcasts from a battery-powered radio. McLuhan compares the wonderment of the native with the occultation of everyday technologies among urban dwellers who, despite being immersed in a media-rich environment, are no less in need of developing their own technological “literacy.” With Julian Bleecker’s Wifi.Bedouin, the concept of inserting wireless signals into unexpected places – and thereby suggesting new ways of thinking about the world – has been updated for the 21st century. The result is a compelling revision of the dominant logic of mobile and pervasive media, emphasizing locality over ubiquity and promoting awareness of the limits of even the most fetishized new technologies.

At the risk of suggesting that, to some extent, the medium of the Wifi.Bedouin provides its own message, Bleecker’s device is perhaps best understood as a cognitive tool, a means of creating conceptual and technical possibilities rather than a discrete object unto itself. The Bedouin also merges the ordinarily disparate worlds of the tinkerer-hacker-slasher with that of the academic or cultural investigator. In fact, the Wifi.Bedouin breaks no new technological ground, relying instead on several relatively common digital components that are ingeniously assembled into a self-contained, mobile package. More adventurous users are invited to try their hand at assembling a Bedouin themselves by following the step-by-step instructions in the Wifi.Bedouin DIY guide. For the less technically inclined, Vectors is soliciting project proposals for an ongoing series of field tests in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of both wireless technology and the cultural imaginary it has activated.

Mobile Voices project and class

Comm 620: Mobile Phones, On-Line Community, and Social Change, a year-long biweekly multidisciplinary research seminar
Instructors:
François Bar (Communication),
Steve Anderson (Cinematic Arts)
Murali Annavaram (Viterbi School of Engineering)
This seminar explores how mobile phones can serve to build on-line community, even among people who are mostly off-line. It runs in parallel with “Mobile Voices”, an academic-community partnership project to research and design a platform allowing low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. The seminar provides a venue where researchers can explore the social, theoretical and technical issues raised by Mobile Voices. Students will engage in year-long research projects, individually or in groups, structured to culminate in publication by the end of the year. Some of these projects will directly be part of Mobile Voices, but there will be room for other research projects exploring the role of mobile phones in fostering community and/or social change.
Information about Mobile Voices can be found at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMob and a syllabus-in-progress for the class at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMobClass

(more…)

Monumento 872 tomorrow night

This Friday beginning at 8:00PM Monumento 872 offers an opportunity to unearth and engage downtown Los Angeles in the night using mobile devices, GPS tracking, and media databases, that become part of a live media collage created by visitors, surrounding communities, and online participants. The evening of culture will explore artistic and historical landscapes of Los Angeles through the expressive potential of emerging mobile media, live music, graph art, artist performances, and an installation of art objects. The event celebrates and takes place in one of Los Angeles’ latest “historical cultural monuments”, the Juncture Block Building, and at the new Los Angeles State Historic Park.