The slideshow accompanying Tetsuo’s presentation at the Tate was titled The Phenomenology Of Radio. He didn’t really develop that theme in his talk, but his website goes a little further, and touches on the phenomenology of reception, as experienced through very low power community FM. Reception, he points out, is active. To get a signal, you may have to go outdoors, or at least place your receiver somewhere unusual. You are not a passive consumer, you are involved in the process. This thought extends to wireless: you must actively seek out an open node, and locate yourself in relation to both it and your particular needs, in the moment. This reflects, of course, the currently few locations where reception is even possible, let alone appropriate to a given need. Community networking can exploit this phenomenology. The most simple location-sensitivity is defined through range: certain content can be kept local — accessible only if you are in range of the wifi segment on which it is hosted. Keeping content local to subnets may be the easiest way for communities to create location-specific experiences — exploiting the raw characteristics of radio reception to force the active presence of an audience.

Yesterday I attended the Wireless Cultures symposium at Tate Modern (archived here).

Two highlights: Tetsuo Kogawa’s ‘cooking show’ demonstration of Mini-FM, and Nancy Porter’s presentation. She works with Antenna Audio, who do audio tours for galleries. Last year they implemented a trial location-sensitive wifi guide system at the Tate using ruggedised iPaqs and some clever triangulation heuristics, with software from Pango Systems. Nice to see some people actually doing this stuff rather than just showing off vapourware and industrial design mockups.

A few thoughts on all of this to follow later in the week.

“You’re never more than 8 feet from a rat”

Central london — how far are you from a live but inactive cellphone…surely bluetooth range, if there was software to build a mesh from that proximity and use it…what’s the ratio of inactive to active phones within range at any moment? 5 to 1? Higher? Enough anyway to have enough bandwidth to serve as routers…

consider the phone function as superfluous — hack the thing to get at the codecs and redirect traffic over bluetooth instead, ignore the GSM system entirely, free p2p calls…

of which, killer app for pocketpc-based wireless devices? — H.323-based voicecalls over wireless, just use the damn things like DECT phones…

Community wireless…imagining SSIDs used as virtual tags– ‘”this side of this street is clan ku24″, back up the claim with graffiti tags to proclaim the same in the real world…

each community mesh as infranet for the likeminded…microcultural spaces/regions…

what’s in it for the kids? archives of warez and mp3s? rich media messaging…we’re HERE, NOW

Ages ago, we had the idea for the net.sack; a small rucksack thing with stalk camera and headset mic/earpiece, and decent bandwidth cellphone transmitting it all. So you could rent yourself out to whoever is at the other end of the connexion, and they can watch and direct — for remote shopping, tourism in general, whatever makes sense ethically and/or economically.

That was about 7 years ago…I think now, much more interesting with GPS — ‘hook me into someone THERE’, with there being pretty much anywhere…so it becomes realtime, border-hopping — p2p to people.

and right on the edge of enabling that being simply a checkbox on the settings of any decent modern cellphone with a video camera hookup.

assuming of course that at some point the price of 3G becomes sane

or of course the other more interesting route — mesh network of low power 802.11b or bluetooth descendents…

…of course that would just be shadowing, active control presumes complicity, involvement, a place for this idea to nest in people’s heads…

…and don’t start with the whole gibson loa thing…