Hot Spot Bloom: do you know where your wi-fi hotspots are?
flavorpill lists events in major cities in the US. This one set me back on my complacent I don’t know much butt.
Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art & the City hits New York this weekend (Oct. 1 to 3/04).
Who’s invited?
Computer geeks, artists, freelancers, and students alike unite to celebrate WiFi at a three-day tech fest that includes discussions, workshops, and proposal presentations. The makers of Urballoon present a new communication channel that fuses design, urban studies, and the power of WiFi.
Karen Lee’s Hot Spot Bloom is a wearable flower that detects WiFi signals and changes colors depending on connection strength.
Karen Lee says, “The idea for Hotspot Bloom began as a portable sculpture for open parks around Manhattan. When I first started this project, I found there was little physical demarcation for open wi-fi networks. Most people didn’t even realize that free wi-fi could be found in many of the parks around NYC.
My sculpture was intended as a form of intervention that would create visibility for these services. I chose to use flowers because they were emblematic of the vitality of information. The flowers would bloom and grow using servo motors and lights to indicate the availability of an open wireless networks. ”
I thought leaping from a rotary dial phone to a touch-tone phone was a feat of HMmmm for me.
How much technology HMmmm abounds that you know about and I don’t?