Wayfarer (2015)

Wayfarer was an experimental digital artwork and design probe that explored the ‘experience’ that digital devices such as smartphones have in the city, highlighting that even seemingly mundane objects embody a ‘knowledge’ of the world and their place in it.

Project team: Chris Marmo, Reuben Stanton

Commissioned by: Nite Art

The Wayfarer is made of open source hardware, and is built with various sensors that are tuned both to fixed infrastructures – like WiFi networks and mobile cell towers – and to more transitory, ad-hoc ‘infrastructures’ created by movements of bodies and mobile devices, and detected through sound, sight, sonar, network and bluetooth sensors.

As the device travels, it experiences things in the world that are invisible to you or me, but readily noticed by the many devices that traverse our space with us.

What it ‘sees’ is recorded a format that can be played back, visualised, and ‘read’ to gain a new understanding of the world. In this way, wayfarer reveals the unseen infrastructure and activity of our digital devices as they interact and communicate with each other, mostly without our knowledge.

The Wayfarer device and exhibition invites reflection on what digital devices ‘know’ about the world around them as they travel through the city.

Wayfarer was commissioned by the Nite Art Festival in 2015 and exhibited at the Russell Place Substation in Melbourne, Australia.