Future Wireless: practical.discourse.creative • L.Sykes \

by Lewis Sykes

Overview
Wireless technologies have changed the world and continue to do so at an unprecedented rate. But as we embrace these technologies, we also need to ask how are they changing our personal and social spaces? Do we really want mobile phone calls on commercial flights – or is ‘always-on’ culture making us wireless wage slaves? Who owns the wireless world and how can we truly realise its creative potential beyond the realms of corporate culture? Has wireless technology liberated communication or has it simply revealed a darker, more dysfunctional side to our natures? What can users and practitioners do to take control of the airwaves and shape and colour their own future? These are just some of the global issues, which Future Wireless addressed – not just through live debate – but also through practical demonstration, workshops and unique artist interventions.

Cybersalon, working in collaboration with Open Spectrum UK and in partnership with the Science Museum’s Dana Centre and NODE.London, commissioned a day of debate, guerrilla art and wireless workshops. It assembled an international group of cultural commentators, researchers and artists alongside free wireless network activists and commercial developers to probe the nature, impact and potential of the wireless internet, mobile telecommunications and other radio based technologies.

Through an ACE Grants for the Arts Award, Cybersalon supported research and development
projects by three artist groups – taxi_onomy, Someth;ng and Troika – to develop critical and constructive interventions into the event programme that highlighted the potential of a wireless future. These interventions were designed, developed and delivered by the artists and aimed to facilitate communication and exchange between participants and visitors at the Dana Centre, remotely, and at the other NODE.London events throughout the course of the October 2005 Open Season.

The Wireless Horizons evening panel debate gathered leading figures from industry, academia and the front-line of wireless activism to explore the social, cultural and political contours of a wireless future.

Chaired by John Wilson, co-founder, Open Spectrum UK, participants included:
*Dooeun Choi – curator, Art Center Nabi, Seoul, Korea.
*Peter Cochrane – co-founder, Concept Labs (formerly CTO of BT).
*Robert Horvitz – coordinator Open Spectrum International, Prague.
*Adam Hyde - new media artist, from New Zealand, with a special interest in streaming media, in both visual and audio contexts.
*Tapio Mäkelä – researcher and media artist, USED project in collaboration with m-cult centre for new media culture, Helsinki, Finland and HIIT.
*Francis McKee - research fellow at Glasgow School of Art and part-time Head of Digital Arts and New Media at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow.
*Ian Robinson - BT, Head of Emerging Internet Access products and Wimax expert.
*Marc Tuters – researcher in new media, University of Southern California’s Annenberg Centre

Future Wireless was part of a series events and projects programmed by Cybersalon as founding an ‘artists in residence’ programme at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.

To find out more about Cybersalon visit the website http://www.cybersalon.org.