NetNiet.org

 

During the first two weeks of september 2006 Renee van der Nat, Cindy van Rooyen and I set up a wireless festival in the center of Utrecht.

Visitors were able to walk through Utrecht and play with the wireless additions to the city we had set up. There were also a series of lectures and workshops about wireless media and their relation to the city.

This page covers the four types of installations (NotSpots, bluetooth fotobanks, voicemail stories and GPS treasurehunts), as well as the lectures and workshops.

You can also visit the page about the designwork I did for the festival, which includes the official festival website . 

Above: guests playing with the net.artworks exhibited on the wireless internet NotSpots. Around town we had placed 5 hotspots where, once you logged in, you could only view one artwork we had selected for that location.

Below: We kicked of the festival with an afternoon filled with lectures and presentations on various wireless media. For more details visit the official festival website.

Below: We placed two "bluetooth photobanks" behind shopwindows. People could place pictures they had taken with their bluetooth camera telephone on these screens for everyone to see. We gathered over 200 pictures this way which can all be viewed on the festival website.

Below: The first workshop we did entailed soldering wireless radio emitters in the open air. Lotte Meijer kindly supplied the parts and led the workshop.

Below: Another aspect of the festival were the "voicemail stories". We hung ten phonenumbers at interesting spots around town. When people rang these numbers, they would be greeted with a poem, a song, or something else. After the beep they could leave their own message. Every night we, the festival curators, would set the best response as the welcoming message for the next day, to which people could respond again, etc, etc.

Right: During two of the saturdays we held workshops in which a poet from Utrecht (Herman Kasper Gilissen and Tifen) would guide participants through town, visiting some of the voicemail stories locations.

Together they created fresh poems which were recorded as the voicemail welcoming messages on the spot.

Below & to the Right: We also hid little presents around town and then gave hints and GPS coordinates on the festival website that hinted at their whereabouts. It was basically a version of a sport called "geocaching " that is practiced all around the world.

One of the possibilties that we encouraged was for people who found the hidden treasure to take one of the presents from it, add a new present, and then hide it again in a new spot in the center of town.

Can you find the treasure in the picture to the right?