Wi-Fi is something most of us are constantly using, yet it’s invisible to the human eye. We only know it as webpages and emails and streamed music and all the other online activities it lets us do. Artist Peter Jellitsch decided to visualize the signal his apartment received, to produce a sculpture from the fluctuations the signal underwent over a period of 45 days.Not the first person to give visual form to a Wi-Fi signal—a previous attempt includes Timo Arnall, Einar Sneve Martinussen, and Jørn Georg ‘s light painting wifi project—Jellitsch’s project, called Bleecker Street Documents, involved him recording the signal using a piece of equipment that measures radio waves.He then mapped this data onto a flat plane over time and the points rose and fell depending on the signal’s strength. The resulting physical sculpture was milled on a CNC machine and looks like a mountain rendered in polygons. The sculpture, what Jellitsch calls a “fragmented space description,” and documentation from its creation were all included in an exhibition of the piece.
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