W3FI Laleh Mehran and Christopher Coleman

a r t + r e s e a r c h

W3FI

Laleh Mehran and Christopher Coleman

The Techne Lab, University of Colorado

2017

The Techne Lab, University of Colorado, BoulderBoulder, Coloradoart.colorado.edu

© 2017 by Lelah Mehran and Christopher ColemanAll rights reserved.

W3FI

The W3FI is a social movement, a philosophy, a path to responsible connectivity between our online/offline lives and to each other. Everyday we find more of our lives integrated in the digital world, with no distinct separation between our virtual lives and our real lives. This means we have to take control of and responsibility for how others see and relate to us in the digital world. We are proposing a new strategy for our online interactions called W3FI (wee-fie). A combination of Wi-Fi, the word "we" and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter "e," W3FI references the digital parts of our lives. People consider Wi-Fi to be an invisible shared connection around us, and transforming this term to include "we" indicates a new awareness of how interconnected we really are online. W3FI is more than artwork, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.

Inspired by the Buddhist path to enlightenment, the project takes the participants through a journey of understanding, starting with consideration of

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how their digital self (we are using the term "S3LF") impacts their everyday lives. Next they see how connected all S3LFs are and therefore how every action affects the S3LF of others; how their S3LF is a part of the W3. The final step is to decide to move from being a passive part of the W3 to being part of the W3FI, the collective of S3LFs who lift up each other by interacting positively, with encouragement, help, sharing, and understanding. In this way we address issues ranging from cyber-bullying to open-source knowledge.

W3FI has been experienced by tens of thousands of people in three cities across North America, as well as international venues including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the 404 International Festival of Art & Technology in Argentina, and the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in the United Arab Emirates. Although this project began in 2011, every exhibition is truly unique. For each city we take the project to, the entire installation is reformatted to become location specific: the programming is redone for best interaction, data visualizations all contain new localized information, black vinyl silhouettes are created from local landmarks and cultural sites, the text reflects the local languages, and the real-time social media integration is tailored for each city. We believe in creating an experience that is highly local, while showcasing the very global nature of our new century.

The W3FI exhibition is a space for discussion, learning, and consideration. Black vinyl silhouettes created from local landmarks and cultural icons

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envelope the gallery walls giving a sense of the physical. When considering which buildings and representations to incorporate in the vinyl wall graphics, we request help from the hosting organization for recommendations so we may include more local perceptions rather than solely relying on what we might find in our research. To date we have covered between 500–600 linear feet of wall space with our vinyl visuals. These graphics are coupled with perfectly matched projections, animating statistics about national and international use of the Internet, mobile phones, and social networks. The projection mapping also provides a dynamic method to lead the viewer throughout the exhibition via text explaining the W3FI philosophy laid out in a series of text and symbols moving from the S3LF wall to the W3 wall and finally to the W3FI wall. Another local element is the display of live Twitter feeds from the area residents that update about twice a minute. On the S3LF and W3 walls were live tweets from area residents who use the word "I" or "we" followed by the next two words in the sentence creating short, often lyrical phrases related to the actions or moods of the digital social space. There is often a tall graphic element or building that we use to visually integrate the tweets into the exhibition.

To further expand on the philosophies behind our online connectivity, there is a camera positioned for visitors to have their face captured and instantly incorporated into an ever-growing network with other visitors. An aspect of the interaction is that the photographs are distributed and connected randomly to signify how our digital selves are not

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only connected to our personal networks but to many other groups as well. These interactions have proven to be very popular, often with lines of people that facilitate discussions among strangers about W3FI’s underlying concepts.

To reveal information about online connectivity in the region we often created different data visualizations; one was a display of all the registered cell towers in the region, another was a display of the density of Wi-Fi routers in the region. The third set of information sometimes displayed was the location and amount of mobile data use over an average week in a region. This information was donated by Skyhook, a company who provides mapping information to mobile phone application makers such as Yelp. We were able to obtain this information for exhibitions in the United States, but were not able to acquire this data for the international editions.

The first edition of this project was created for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMOCA). The overall aesthetics, viewer interaction, digital components and physical objects of W3FI were developed for this edition, as well as the philosophy that explained our ideas. I (Mehran) was invited to participate in this three-person group show at BMOCA on the theme of Diversity. Due to the majority white population in the area and the invisible undocumented workforce, I was not interested in presenting a project on the subject of being an Iranian-American with such a themed show. At this point I invited Christopher Coleman to collaborate on this project. During a residency

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at the Chautauqua Institute we saw a need to focus the project on the digital aspects of our lives. Our research showed that in Boulder there were many more cell towers, mobile and internet activities closer to the University in contrast to the edges of town. There is obvious logic to this, however the lack of cell towers where lower-income immigrants and invisible workers live did mean they had less access, availability, and thus presence in the digital “space.” We created data visualization projected on a sculptural map of Boulder that clearly revealed the technology distribution and was an interesting and enlightening point of discovery for most museum visitors. We were certainly not the first to bring attention to this issue and it may have been good timing with W3FI highlighting it, but the city of Boulder soon initiated plans to expand cellular voice and data services to those areas.

Unique to this exhibition and because it was the first, many components needed to be created. We fabricated custom acrylic cube seats lit from within via LED lights. The light patterns were modeled after the flocking of birds and fish and evolved over time, much like our personal social networks. This was both a simple visualization of the concept of connectivity as well as a place for visitors to sit as they read our text and viewed the work.

Just under a year after its initial creation, W3FI was accepted into the CURRENTS: Santa Fe International New Media Festival. The project was given its own room, which made it the most intimate edition of this exhibition to date, and in this way seemed to foster longer conversations between visitors and

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deeper connection with the ideas of the work. We encountered many scientists in attendance at this W3FI who expressed how they had been thinking about the concepts and representations of data for decades but they were interested in our new approach of seeing our personal data as a “body,” not something separate from ourselves.

Also in 2012, W3FI was accepted into the 404 International Festival of Art & Technology in Rosario, Argentina. One of the primary tasks was to change the language of the project, which required us to hire a professional translator to convert the text into Argentine Spanish. Due to the cost of shipping, there was also a shift away from our acrylic seats to designing and fabricating new flat-pack, lightweight seats which could collapse down to fit in a suitcase. The festival was brief in duration with high impact engagement. At the time, Rosario had more recently entered the mobile and technology market, and with this major shift an overwhelming number of citizens had deep philosophical questions and concerns. It was fortuitous timing for us to be able to engage in such conversations as other locations of our exhibitions had already gone through this shift and these very important questions were no longer foremost in the public’s mind.

Less than two months later we installed a solo exhibition of W3FI at the Artisphere Gallery in Arlington, VA. This was the largest edition of this project, covering approximately 130 linear feet of gallery walls. The local tweets appearing in the exhibit were heavily focused on the daily D.C. politics—this was a unique perspective based on the

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proximity to the U.S. Capitol. In addition to the W3FI exhibition, we were commissioned by the Arlington County Culture Fund to create a large-scale projection, mapping video for the building’s exterior dome for Light Up Roslyn. The animation connected directly to the W3FI exhibit inside, but reached a broader audience since it could be seen from blocks away.

We also created an abridged edition, W3FI: Denver, CO, for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, in collaboration with a group of teen artists as a way of educating them about global connectivity and digital art processes.

We were delighted to have W3FI accepted to the prestigious International Symposium on Electronic Art hosted in the United Arab Emirates in 2014. The dominant culture and religion of the country required us to rethink certain aspects of the interaction, especially in regard to the collection of visitors’ images. In all the previous editions, a camera setup with facial recognition software would automatically take a photo of the visitor who stood in a designated area. It was critical for us to take Islamic laws into consideration and thus the camera feature was completely reconfigured with a button for visitors to push in order to have their photograph taken and incorporated in the larger projection with other visitors. Much to our surprise, the camera was extremely popular with women who would take many photographs with our camera and then bring friends for many more photographs. They referred to the camera as the “selfie” station, and it was rather interesting to see so much excitement in sharing

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self-portraits with the network of strangers. Also, while we hired a professional translator to convert our text into Arabic, there were major technical challenges in regard to the language orientation and structure for all of the animated and real-time text incorporated into the projections.

We were deeply honored by the invitation to exhibit W3FI for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, Taiwan. We created a new edition of the artwork which included silhouettes in vinyl of the many newly erected iconic buildings, adapted the technology to work with Plurk (a popular social media stream comparable to Twitter in Taiwan), and hired a professional translator to convert our text into Mandarin, the official language of Taiwan. An important aspect of this exhibition was the remote management of the technologically complex and long-term 3-month installation. Such an exhibition requires many additional safeguards and methods to ensure the proper operation of the artwork. An integral component of the W3FI artwork is in regard to the site-specificity of the gallery design. For this exhibition, the spatial information conveyed beforehand was different, due to recent renovations, than the actual specifications and thus upon arrival we had to completely redesign the entire experience.

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The W3FI Manifesto

In the beginning, we made places, virtual spaces where anyone could be anything.

Every part of you that never found life here could be there.

Everything was temporary and changing.

Anonymity meant no consequences, no connections to the real.

The S3LF came into being, a digital self made up of a collection of your online representations.

ATM transactions, cell phone calls, electricity bills, blogs, tweets, flickr images all build an image, a representation of who you are.

There is no longer any Anonymity.

Everything we do online and almost everything offline is now recorded and saved, Google-able forever.

Every action in either world represents who we are to anyone who cares to look.

Every action affects our S3LF and our self, and the S3LF is becoming more and more important every day.

The internet is a network, where everything affects everything else.

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Other people can affect your S3LF, and you can affect theirs.

An insult, a bad review, a video or an altered photo can reshape the ways people see a S3LF.

You have no control over what others do to your S3LF.

Other S3LFs can be celebrated and destroyed by you.

We are all part of this now.

All the S3LFs are the W3.

W3 all have S3LFs that are important to us.

W3 have to think differently about who W3 are.

W3 have to acknowledge the power for good and destruction W3 wield.

W3 have to become betterinThe places where W3 find each otherinThe ways W3 fit connections to one anotherinThe things W3 fix togetherinThe W3 FIThe W3FI

W3FI: Boulder CO - 2011W3FI: Santa Fe NM - 2012W3FI: Rosario Argentina - 2012W3FI: Arlington VA - 2013W3FI: Taiwan - 2014W3FI: Dubai UAE - 2014W3FI: Colorado Springs CO - (2017)

a r t + r e s e a r c h

Mark Amerika, What Is Techne?

Laleh Mehran and Christopher Coleman, W3FI