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Warbike in Ottawa

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This is a last minute thing, but if anybody is in or going to Ottawa there is a conference underway looking at movement in cities.

May 1-5, 2006
Cultures in Transit
Gallery 115
100 Laurier Ave E., room 115, University of Ottawa
11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

One project, by Toronto based artist David McCallum is called Warbike: My project is a sonification of WiFi networks. Participants can sign out a bicycle and backpack that will make music based on the wireless networks the rider is riding through. It acts as a means of discovering the invisible human communications activity in a neighbourhood. The warbike will be available to the public throughout the week. There are other artworks of the public can take for a spin on the town, so I’d encourage people to come and play.

Sometimes it’s fun to ride the streetcar with an open laptop and watch all the WiFi networks you pass though, and the weird names people give them. It’s another way to map the city.

In 2002 Matt Jones started “Warchalking” in the UK (where the term “Warbike” comes from), where networks were marked in public space using symbols based on old hobo markings. Warchalking in practice probably didn’t happen very much (I don’t recall seeing one) but it made quite a spash when he launched it. However, at a talk I saw Jones give in 2004 or so at the Design Exchange, he declared warchalking dead, as the Wifi cloud is big enough that one can assume a network exists in many places.

All that is to say is Warbike sounds fun, and there are rumours it will come to Toronto soon.

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4 comments

  1. The word “warbike” is in the same tradition as “warchalking”, but it isn’t derived directly from it. Both terms, along with “wardriving” and various other “war-“prefixed neologisms, are derived from “war dialing”.

    War dialing is the practice of looking for interesting computer systems by using a modem to dial lots of numbers on spec (perhaps all of the numbers in a given telephone exchange, for instance). The practice is depicted in the movie War Games.

  2. War Games, that’s right. Thanks for the geneology.

    War Games, along with The Day After and a couple other films, helped whip up a good amount of cold war fear and paranoia when i was 10 yrs old.

  3. So, This warbike and the attendant wifiness.

    How does this go about working?

    I’ve managed to make ‘music’ where music is a lot of terrible scratching and pinging noisess, out of my wifi connection on my linux box by directing the raw wifi signal to the sound card

    tcpick -i wlan0 -yR > /dev/dsp

    but that only really works on a single connection but as for making this roamable, i’m assuming that you’d have to put the wireless card into ‘passive’ mode with something like kismac, and dump the interveining packets into /dev/dsp in the same way..

    Back in 2003 nat friedman of ximian/novel did this in paris with this little ten line script

    http://www.nat.org/2003/april/

    #!/bin/sh
    #
    # Beep more frequently when the wireless link is stronger.
    #

    while true
    do
    wvlevel=`grep “^ eth1” /proc/net/wireless |awk ‘{print $3}’ |cut -d. -f 1`

    usleep 1000
    if [ $RANDOM -lt $(($wvlevel * 129)) ]
    then
    echo -n 
    fi
    echo $wvlevel…
    done

    By the same token, it would be fun to constantly monitor the names of local networks, and play a certain tune as long as they are available, or with a volume based on their strength. This would be more pleasant to listen to than my garbled packet-noise.

    It would take a lot of doing..
    It’s definately something to do on a bike, rather than a car, because the car moves too fast, doesn’t stay long enough to have the sounds even repeat.

    ————–

    mapping out sounds to form actual musical compositions would be wierd.

    one could start with a set number of bars.
    x x x x x x x x
    and then map notes to them at randomish
    f a c
    a d g
    c# c#

    i guess different kinds of networks could run on different bar-lengths, or different note-lengths.
    so that the tunes could be more representational of the surrounding wifi environment.

    wpa secure networks, really slow, bassy.
    wep secure networks, regular and beaty.
    open nodes, lots of notes, large number of bars
    open nodes with default settings, regular but melodyish..

    yah, this is a fun idea.