The Network - Installation Text
‘Network: is a plurality of (organic and artificial) beings, of humans and machines who perform common actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interoperation’? (Berardi, 2011)
The network has become central to our experience of the world, its tentacles reaching into every area of life. Linking together machine to machine, people to machines and people to people through giant invisible networks of information; a technical infrastructure of cables that feeds an invisible infrastructure of wireless signals.
As part of the mediating environments exhibition, John Wild will be transforming the gallery space into a dysfunctional network of devices, creating an invisible geography of wireless communications, as devices try and fail to establish contact, calling out to each other through unanswered electromagnetic signals.
This network of electromagnetic communications will be made knowable to visitors to the show through a handheld receiver that makes the invisible geography audible.
On the opening night, John Wild will carry out a live electromagnetic audio drift of the gallery. Making use of electromagnetic induction coils and a broad spectrum RF receiver he will allow himself to be guided by the intensities, textures, and ambiences of the site’s electromagnetic transmissions, materialising the invisible architecture of the ‘The Network’.
