免費無線上網啟動！ 學者關心頻寬

http://tw.news.yahoo.com/article/url/d/a/110927/115/2zhll.html
【台灣醒報記者陳昭妤台北報導】隨時隨地收發電子郵件將不再是夢。總統馬英九今天宣布，10月7日起，台灣全省將新增2520個熱點供WiFi免費無線上網，範圍擴及外島地區，民眾只要以TPE-Free的帳號即可申請使用全省的i Taiwan無線網路。然而，許多民眾受訪時表示，TPE-Free512Kbps的速率已夠慢，不會特別期待相同速率的i Taiwan。東華大學副校長張瑞雄受訪時也說，政府既有心，則擴大頻寬會更有價值。

一張密密麻麻散布著i Taiwan無線網路熱點的全省示意圖擺在現場，引來記者圍觀討論，總統馬英九、行政院長吳敦義等人今天聯手宣布10月7日起將提供全省民眾免費試用i Taiwan無線上網，11月10日起將正式上路。

研考會副主委宋餘俠受訪時說，台灣是繼新加坡、巴拿馬後，第3個建置全國無線網路的國家，大部分國家目前僅推行城市無線上網，他說，i Taiwan上路後，除了台灣本島，外島如金門、澎湖，甚至小琉球等地都可享受無線上網的服務。

宋俠軍也強調，為了完整建構i Taiwan系統，政府每年約需投入9千多萬元，其中包括4485萬元的建置費，加上4千多萬元的網路費，由各部會分攤、負擔，期望給民眾最好的上網品質。他也強調，對於各地方縣市政府，將會提供必要的經費協助。

由於這次的i Taiwan無線網路頻寬仍維持在512Kbps，因此許多受訪民眾都表示不會特別期待。住在台北的林先生和孫小姐受訪時一致認為，政府想在全省推動無線網路讓民眾便利上網是好事，但若速度和TPE-Free一樣慢，則便利的效果有限。家住彰化的張先生也說，先前使用TPE-Free時，只要圖案多一點的網頁就會打不開，且速度也不夠快，因此對於將推行的i Taiwan，他不會特別期待。

對此，負責i Taiwan主要事務的行政院政務委員張進福表示，政府的無線上網本就僅提供民眾瀏覽網頁與收發Email，因此若民眾要看影片或下載遊戲可能就不適合。

然而，東華大學副校長張瑞雄受訪時表示，目前無線上網最高頻寬已可達54MB，只提供512Kbps這樣的頻寬的確不夠，試想，若有10個人同時使用，則每人只剩約51Kbps可用，速度必然變慢，因此若要認真推展無線上網，應擴大頻寬，最好是將無線網路當作一個基礎建設來做，從建置10 MB的前導無線寬頻開始，讓民眾真正享有快速便利的上網服務。

即將於10月7日上路試用的i Taiwan無線網路，將提供全省包括捷運、碼頭、各大旅遊景點等熱點，試用期間民眾若遇到問題可撥打客服專線0800-081-051，政府會依民眾建議繼續改善系統。

The story

The interdisciplinary collaboration was taken for granted today, but we may resist with the outcome that we are not familiar with.
My works are the uncategorized for anthropology, archaeology, fine art and digital art.
I try to depict the development of my works step by step.

The focus of my research is the interaction between material culture and human activity.

I had several opportunities to participate in archaeological fieldwork when I was an undergraduate student. I was fascinated by the archaeologists who created a study subject based on a hybrid of time and space by digging at various sites, and locating and categorizing the remains using horizontal grids and vertical layers via a soil color chart. Although the archaeologists focused on the analysis of the remains found, without regard to the visual aspect of the archaeological discovery progress, their grids and layers system made a great impression on me.

Based on the kinship courses I have taken, I learned about the house society theory proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss led us to rethink how a house as a material culture helps anthropologists to explore the visible and invisible relationships and activities in societies. For my B.A. thesis, I attempted to analyze the phenomena of multiple figures of one Mazu goddess in Taiwanese Mazu folk religions utilizing the house concept. I replaced temples for houses and used incense burners as the medium for figures sharing body substances. This attempt aimed to present the connection between identity and objects via “temples as houses” to understand how believers perceived the relations between Mazu figures. At the same time, for my NSC project, I continued to develop a house study via the study of international spouses living in rural villages. In that project, I noticed that sharing food and kinship duties were the main keys to converting foreign spouses to members in the family and house. During this period, I was training myself to think broader, beyond the kinship aspect of the house society theory.

To expand my knowledge and abilities for my postgraduate study with interdisciplinary collaboration, I enrolled in psychological linguistics courses in a graduate institute of linguistics to explore the connection between external presentation and internal logic. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory, proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is a key concept that I learned from the courses in that it links objects under different categories via breaking the boundaries using the mapping principle. The mapping principle is a rule which connects the Target Domain (the idea or concept that is described) to the Source Domain (the object applied to describe the Target Domain). The Target Domain and the Source Domain are separated into different categories, so linguistics looks for attributes that are shared by both to understand the mapping principle. In anthropology, categorization is an important system in which the natives distinguish themselves from others, such as in Huang Ying-Kuei’s study concerning the Bunun’s food categorization system. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory aids in analyzing categorization and understanding how conceptual metaphors help natives configure information about the boundary between themselves and others. The house theory is similar to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, since people construct their identities based on food sharing and living in the same house. In my subsequent studies, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory was a fundamental method in discovering the connection between houses and other objects in societies.

My M.A. thesis focused on the construction of identities via house-related material cultures. I integrated my previous studies with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and created an archaeology project investigating a Paiwanese village and their abandoned settlement. I applied cultural layers to describe the migration of the tribes and the grids to locate their objects　(i.e., house, tomb, and settlement), which were connected by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Although the building sources had changed and the duration of the settlement was short because of multiple forced migrations, houses became the Source Domain for the identity metaphor. The reason houses became an abstract concept is the accumulation of migration stories about houses and their eventual separation from their tombs, where ancestors ceased living with the living physically and hence conceptually.

From my experience in anthropology studies, I have found shortcomings and restrictions in this methodology. Anthropologists obtain abundant information by staying at particular spots for long periods to investigate and study the daily life of natives as living biographies. Under those conditions, anthropologists are passive receivers and interpreters. The text is full of native terms creating an exotic atmosphere, and every culture seems different from other cultures. The result is that every culture is seen as independent, with a difficult-to-compare existence, and hence cross-cultural studies become a battlefield of vocabulary without holistic viewpoints. In contrast, I wanted to reverse this method of study to create a specific way to conduct cross-cultural researches. This shift is different from traditional anthropology, so I needed support from different disciplines to achieve my goal. At the same time, I found that contemporary art offered me a possible way to develop my experiment.

Grids and layers were applied by Josef Albers and Richard Paul Lohse to study the interaction between colours and to transform 3-D to 2-D, similar to the way archaeologists and anthropologists position objects in the field and convert their fields to text. After the work of these pioneers, grids and layers were widely adopted in the minimal and conceptual art movements. I referred to the works of different artists and adopted colours (layers) and grids as my tools to create a hybrid of time and space as my study subject.


My doctoral project involved visualizing Wi-Fi networks in London, Taipei, New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong to explore how individual networks construct urban landscapes and their identities. According to Le Corbusier, houses are machines in which we live. I reversed his idea, assigning Wi-Fi users as cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) living in Wi-Fi houses. Then I applied the house society theory to visualise Wi-Fi access points as houses with colours and grids to construct 3-D-based 2-D landscapes. Colours were translated from unique Wi-Fi machine codes that represented individual Wi-Fi machines. The codes could also be tracked to the manufacturer, so the colours also offered a connection between individuals and capitalism. This work presents the different aspects of Wi-Fi machines as a house metaphor in their respective societies and extended anthropology to study material culture and human activity via multiple ways to reveal the connection between them.



For the future



In the future, I will continue to my research on the methodology of anthropology in urban landscapes, identity, technology and cyborgs. My study will focus on the application of metaphor in creating the connection between the material cultures and the representation medium.
。

The motives:

When it was born, anthropology is a visual, acoustic and sense-based discipline. Anthropologists studied the craftwork, food, architectures, languages and music to realize the social and cultural connections behind them. That approach was criticized for their lack of the context. With the emphasis of “the native point of view”, contemporary anthropologists obtain the information from the mouth of the informants and the data becomes the main “object” that anthropologist analyzed and the other objects are auxiliary. For example, anthropologists talked about house in the text but physical houses have the different appearances. The former is signifier and the latter is signified as Ferdinand de Saussure proposed. The information was transcribed with text but it results in the differences of material cultures that were ignored with the universal appearance of the text. The physical houses cannot be described/represented completely in the text. To deal with this issue, I chose to abstract the elements from the material cultures to become conceptual metaphor. Material cultures are the solid and visible metaphors of human life and they are another kind of informants. My study plans to create/produce a new methodology to organize the connections between different objects to grasp their information of “native point of view.”



Wi-Fi is a wireless technology that contains two parts, the personal devices and access points. The users utilize their Wi-Fi-equipped electronic devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, to connect to Wi-Fi access points and go on-line. This is the popular landscape in metropolitans and the landscape becomes the metaphor of the interpersonal interactions in daily life. With the municipal Wi-Fi plans and rapid-growing commercial Wi-Fi distribution, more mobile device vendors added Wi-Fi chips to their machines and the spectacle attracted me to analyze and present them in visual and acoustic way to obtain the unspoken and invisible information of “native’s point of view and action.”


The plan:

Granada Centre of Manchester University produced a series of films to overcome the restriction of discourse to challenge the previous anthropological studies “from a different epistemological position.”(Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz 2005: 2) They also acknowledge their result maybe not accepted by the academic world but it is important to extend anthropology to study the human on various of perception, such as hearing and seeing.


Their idea is similar to me and I want to begin my project with a series of combination of fieldwork data and the elements of visual/sound art, including shapes/colours and notes. As Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz pointed out that contemporary art break the conventional understanding for the objects and concepts, my works also aim to inquiry anthropology knowledge and present the fieldwork data to a new view.

I had visualised urban Wi-Fi landscapes and translated them into music to explore how Claude Levi-Strauss’s “house society theory” was transformed an artistic approach to provide us the broader and deeper way to analyze the relations between technology and identity. The steps are listed in the below:


1. Codes of Wi-Fi Access Points -> Colour Codes ->Colour Squares->Colour Brick->Colour House->Colour Landscapes->Wi-Fi Networks

a) Codes of Wi-Fi Access Points => Colour Codes : Dividing the serial number of Wi-Fi access points to web colour codes , but both of them have the same format - numbers and alphabets.


b) Colour Codes => Colour Squares: The web colour codes are embodied in shape. The squares are not the combination of numbers and alphabets, but the visual difference are more obvious than codes.


c) Colour Squares => Colour brick: the shape is the same but the role and the concept of the colour object are changed from the square shape to building material - brick. Brick has the different "function" and the brick implied the possibility of "construction" that is similar to the concept of "constructing a network."


d)　Colour Brick => Colour House : Embodied the function of the "construction" and create an object to be analyzed.
 
e). Colour House => Colour Landscapes: Expanding individual conceptual object (house) to the cultural and social objects (urban landscape that was composed of houses). This change highlighted the conceptual and material aspects of Wi-Fi codes rather than a combination of numbers and alphabets.



f). Colour Landscapes => Wi-Fi Networks: The sudden change from the metaphor (house and landscapes) to the original context (electronic devices) offer an distinguishable spatial representation to emphasize the multiple aspects of Wi-Fi, especially social, political and economical distribution.
。

The conclusion: Wi-Fi codes are the identifiers of users, owners and manufacturers but their connection between the distribution and the social factors are easily ignored. The obvious bias is considering the codes are random in the cities, but the final change marked the distribution is the result of social behaviour and cultural products.


2. Wi-F Codes ->Decimal Number-> MIDI Notes->MIDI Music->Sheet Music.

a). Wi-Fi Codes => Decimal Number: the change and division from the hexadecimal to decimal was to create the MIDI notes.　Hexadecimal is positional numeral system with a base of 16. From 0 to 9 represents zero to nine, and abcdef (case-insensitive) means ten to fifteen. Hexadecimal is widely applied in digital equipments. The transformation of positional number system changes the appearance of "numbers and alphabets" to "number" for fitting human’s conventional numeral system.

b). Decimal Number => MIDI Notes:　MIDI is the abbreviation of “Music Instrument Digital Interface” and it is a protocol for communication between different electronic music instruments and digital devices. The communication is transmitting electronic signal and digital information not audio signal. MIDI notes can be notated by decimal or hexadecimal. The format of decimal number and MIDI notes is the same but the quality (mathematical to music) and the function (number to notes) changed. The notes also implied the composing songs.

c). MIDI Notes => MIDI Music: Embodied the notes and make it acoustic (quality).

d). MIDI Music => Sheet Music: The transformation of "digital to analogous" and "acoustic to visual". In MIDI music, sound will be affected by the neighbouring notes and our ears can not distinguish too high or too low sound. We may ignore the detail in the music but sheet music make it clear and the contour of the notes highlighted Wi-Fi codes in an analogous way.


Above all, the change in every step leads us to rethink how the fieldwork data are expressed and analyzed. In the future, I will collect more data and produce a series of textual, visual and acoustic works to explore the new methodology and new information of “the native’s point of view.”


Music
2011 London Wi-Fi Landscape, http://www.amazon.com/London-Wi-Fi-Landscape/dp/B004YXQI1E, Cuyahoga Falls: SongCast Distribution.
2011 Tube and Wi-Fi Sound in Music, http://official.fm/tracks/266727
2011 Wi-Fi London - ver. 4, http://official.fm/tracks/280240
2011 Beats in The Grid, http://official.fm/tracks/280674


Video
2010 London Urban Wi-Fi Landscape Music, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziXJy_hO9k
2010 London Wi-Fi walking, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAOINa5VjZk
2010 The sound of step, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMu1S5HvZBU
2010 New York Wi-Fi Landscape, http://vimeo.com/16345994
2010 Wi-Fi trip, http://vimeo.com/17010261


Woorks
2011 London Wi-Fi Scores, http://www.saatchionline.com/art/Mixed-Media-Found-Objects-London-Wi-Fi-Scores/160262/1311707/view
2009 Group By Cites, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/choose_city.php
2009 Colour in different forms, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/
2009 "Cyborg in Wi-Fi London" Performance and Exhibition, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/cyborg_exhibition.php
2009 Wi-Fi in New York, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/ny.png
2009 Wi-Fi in Taipei, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/tp.png
2009 Wi-Fi in London, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/ln.png
2009 Wi-Fi in Leeds and Hong Kong, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/lk.png
2009 Colour animation, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/wireless/en/colour_show.php
2007 Colorful Network--- Wireless Art Project, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/wireless/en/

The future plan

The goal:
目標
In the future, I will continue to my research on the methodology of anthropology in urban landscapes, identity, technology and cyborgs. My study will focus on the application of metaphor in creating the connection between the material cultures and the representation medium.
在未來，我將會繼續進人類學方法論上的研究，並且將其運用在都市景觀、認同、科技與人機混合體的相關研究上。我的研究將會專注在應用隱喻創造物質文化與再現媒介之間的連結。

The motives:
動機
When it was born, anthropology is a visual, acoustic and sense-based discipline. Anthropologists studied the craftwork, food, architectures, languages and music to realize the social and cultural connections behind them. That approach was criticized for their lack of the context. With the emphasis of “the native point of view”, contemporary anthropologists obtain the information from the mouth of the informants and the data becomes the main “object” that anthropologist analyzed and the other objects are auxiliary. For example, anthropologists talked about house in the text but physical houses have the different appearances. The former is signifier and the latter is signified as Ferdinand de Saussure proposed. The information was transcribed with text but it results in the differences of material cultures that were ignored with the universal appearance of the text. The physical houses cannot be described/represented completely in the text. To deal with this issue, I chose to abstract the elements from the material cultures to become conceptual metaphor. Material cultures are the solid and visible metaphors of human life and they are another kind of informants. My study plans to create/produce a new methodology to organize the connections between different objects to grasp their information of “native point of view.”
當人類學誕生之實，其是相當以視覺、聽覺與感官為主的學科。人類學家研究工藝品、食物、建築、語言與音樂以理解存在於這些背後的社會與文化的連結。不過這樣的研究取向被批評缺乏脈絡。在強調土著觀點的前提之下，當代人類學家透過報導人的嘴巴獲取資訊，而這樣的資訊也成為人類學家主要的“研究物”，其他的物質文化反而成為了輔助。這些資訊被轉譯為文字，物質文化之間的差異也被文字的普同樣貌而被忽略，如人類學家所提到的家屋，其所指的家屋的面貌是各有不同，前者即為語言學家Ferdinand de Saussure所提到的語言中的能指(signified)，而實體的家屋即為所指(signified)。人類學家研究的是實體的家屋，但是當其化為文字，無論人類學家如何去描述，都無法再現這個家屋。解決這個困境的方法是不去描述物質文化的整個樣貌，而是萃取存在於當中的元素，成為概念隱喻，成為新的研究物體。物質文化是人類生活中的可以感知的隱喻，也是另外一種形式的報導人。我的研究計劃創造/產生新的方法論，組織整理不同物體之間的連結，用以探索不一樣的土著觀點。


Wi-Fi is a wireless technology that contains two parts, the personal devices and access points. The users utilize their Wi-Fi-equipped electronic devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, to connect to Wi-Fi access points and go on-line. This is the popular landscape in metropolitans and the landscape becomes the metaphor of the interpersonal interactions in daily life. With the municipal Wi-Fi plans and rapid-growing commercial Wi-Fi distribution, more mobile device vendors added Wi-Fi chips to their machines and the spectacle attracted me to analyze and present them in visual and acoustic way to obtain the unspoken and invisible information of “native’s point of view and action.”
Wi-Fi是一項無線連線技術，包含了個人設備與無線網路基地台二個部分。使用者使用其具有Wi-Fi功能的電子設備，如筆記型電腦與手機，連線到無線基地台以連上網路。這是在大城市當中常看到的景象，而這景象也成為了日常生活中人際互動的隱喻。隨著城市無線網路建置計畫與快速發展的商業無線網路擴展，越來越多的行動裝置廠商將無線網路晶片放到他們的機器當中，這樣的景觀吸引我分利用視覺與聽覺的方式分析與呈現，並從中獲得無法言說與看不見的土著觀點與行動的資訊。

The plan:
計畫
Granada Centre of Manchester University produced a series of films to overcome the restriction of discourse to challenge the previous anthropological studies “from a different epistemological position.”(Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz 2005: 2) They also acknowledge their result maybe not accepted by the academic world but it is important to extend anthropology to study the human on various of perception, such as hearing and seeing.

曼徹斯特大學的Granada中心的Anna Grimshaw與 Amanda Ravetz製作了一系列的影片去克服人類學文字論述的限制，“從不同的知識論位置”以挑戰過去的人類學研究。他們也承認其結果或許無法被學界所接受，但是這些作品對於拓展人類學研究人類聽覺與視覺的感官是相當重要的。


Their idea is similar to me and I want to begin my project with a series of combination of fieldwork data and the elements of visual/sound art, including shapes/colours and notes. As Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz pointed out that contemporary art break the conventional understanding for the objects and concepts, my works also aim to inquiry anthropology knowledge and present the fieldwork data to a new view.
他們跟我的想法相當類似，我計畫從一系列的田野資料與視覺/聽覺藝術的元素的結合開始我的研究，這些元素包含了形狀/色彩與音符。如同Anna Grimshaw與Amanda Ravetz指出當代藝術打破了原本習慣上對於物體與概念的認識，我的作品也會去質疑人類學知識，並且呈現以新的樣貌呈現田野資料。

I had visualised urban Wi-Fi landscapes and translated them into music to explore how Claude Levi-Strauss’s “house society theory” was transformed an artistic approach to provide us the broader and deeper way to analyze the relations between technology and identity. The steps are listed in the below:
我曾經視覺化了都市的無線網路風景，並且將其轉變為音樂，以探索Claude Levi-Strauss的家屋社會裡論如何轉化為藝術創作方法，以提供給我們更為寬廣與深刻的方式，以分析存在於技術與認同感之間的關聯，研究步驟如下：

1. Codes of Wi-Fi Access Points -> Colour Codes ->Colour Squares->Colour Brick->Colour House->Colour Landscapes->Wi-Fi Networks

1. 無線基地台辨識碼->色彩編碼->彩色方塊->彩色磚塊->彩色家屋>彩色地景->無線網路
a) Codes of Wi-Fi Access Points => Colour Codes : Dividing the serial number of Wi-Fi access points to web colour codes , but both of them have the same format - numbers and alphabets.
a)無線基地辨識碼=>色彩編碼：將無線基地台的編碼分段成為網頁上的色彩編碼，二者都有相同的形式 - 數字與字母。

b) Colour Codes => Colour Squares: The web colour codes are embodied in shape. The squares are not the combination of numbers and alphabets, but the visual difference are more obvious than codes.
b)色彩編碼=>彩色方塊：上一階段的網頁色彩編碼被具體化為形狀。方塊並非是數字與字碼的結合，但是在自覺差異上較編碼更為明顯。

c) Colour Squares => Colour brick: the shape is the same but the role and the concept of the colour object are changed from the square shape to building material - brick. Brick has the different "function" and the brick implied the possibility of "construction" that is similar to the concept of "constructing a network."
c)彩色方塊=>彩色磚塊：形狀上是相同，但是彩色物體的角色與概念從方形轉變為做為建築材料的磚塊。磚塊有不同的功能，而磚塊隱含了構築的可能性，這與”構築網路”的概念是相類似的。

d)　Colour Brick => Colour House : Embodied the function of the "construction" and create an object to be analyzed.
d) 彩色磚塊=>彩色家屋：具體化磚塊的構築的功能，並且創造了可以被研究的物體。 
e). Colour House => Colour Landscapes: Expanding individual conceptual object (house) to the cultural and social objects (urban landscape that was composed of houses). This change highlighted the conceptual and material aspects of Wi-Fi codes rather than a combination of numbers and alphabets.
e) 彩色家屋=>彩色地景：在這個階段，擴展個人概念物體(家屋)到社會層次(由家屋所構成的社會地景)。這個變化強調了無線基地台的辨識碼的概念與物質層次，而非是數字與字母的結合。


f). Colour Landscapes => Wi-Fi Networks: The sudden change from the metaphor (house and landscapes) to the original context (electronic devices) offer an distinguishable spatial representation to emphasize the multiple aspects of Wi-Fi, especially social, political and economical distribution.
f) 彩色地景=>無線網路：突然的從隱喻(家屋與地景)轉變到原本的脈絡(電子設備)提供了一個獨特的空間再現，用以強調無線網路的多個面向，特別是社會的、政治的與經濟的分佈。

The conclusion: Wi-Fi codes are the identifiers of users, owners and manufacturers but their connection between the distribution and the social factors are easily ignored. The obvious bias is considering the codes are random in the cities, but the final change marked the distribution is the result of social behaviour and cultural products.
結論：無線基地台的辨識碼也可以視為是使用者、擁有者與製造廠商的識別物，但是其作為無線網路分佈與社會因素之間的連結很容易被忽略。顯著的例子是認為這些辨識碼是隨機分佈在城市當中，但是在最後從“彩色地景”到“無線網路”的變化標註了這些分佈是社會行為與文化產品的結果。

2. Wi-F Codes ->Decimal Number-> MIDI Notes->MIDI Music->Sheet Music.
2. 無線基地台辨識碼->十進位數字>MIDI音符->MIDI音樂->樂譜
a). Wi-Fi Codes => Decimal Number: the change and division from the hexadecimal to decimal was to create the MIDI notes.　Hexadecimal is positional numeral system with a base of 16. From 0 to 9 represents zero to nine, and abcdef (case-insensitive) means ten to fifteen. Hexadecimal is widely applied in digital equipments. The transformation of positional number system changes the appearance of "numbers and alphabets" to "number" for fitting human’s conventional numeral system.
a) 無線基地辨識碼=>十進位數字：無線基地台的辨識碼是十六進位，也就是是由以16為基數的數學進位制，從0到9代表零到九，abcdef(大小寫不區分)代表從十到十五，十六進位被廣泛應用於數位設備上。將十六進位改為十進位是為了符合人類對於數字的習慣形式。

b). Decimal Number => MIDI Notes:　MIDI is the abbreviation of “Music Instrument Digital Interface” and it is a protocol for communication between different electronic music instruments and digital devices. The communication is transmitting electronic signal and digital information not audio signal. MIDI notes can be notated by decimal or hexadecimal. The format of decimal number and MIDI notes is the same but the quality (mathematical to music) and the function (number to notes) changed. The notes also implied the composing songs.
b) 十進位數字=>MIDI音符：MIDI是 “Music Instrument Digital Interface”(樂器數位介面)的縮寫，它是一種溝通電子樂器與數位設備的通訊協定。它的溝通是藉由傳遞電子訊號與數位資訊，而非是聲音訊號。MIDI的音符可以使用十進位或者是十六進位表示。十進位數字與MIDI音符的格式是相同的，但是其性質從數學轉變為音樂，功能則從數字轉變為音符。在這一個階段中，音符也隱含其夠成為一首曲子的可能性。

c). MIDI Notes => MIDI Music: Embodied the notes and make it acoustic (quality).
c) MIDI音符=>MIDI音樂：將音符數字具體化為音樂音符，使其產生質變，成為可以被聽見的音樂。


d). MIDI Music => Sheet Music: The transformation of "digital to analogous" and "acoustic to visual". In MIDI music, sound will be affected by the neighbouring notes and our ears can not distinguish too high or too low sound. We may ignore the detail in the music but sheet music make it clear and the contour of the notes highlighted Wi-Fi codes in an analogous way.
d) MIDI音樂=>樂譜：這個階段的轉換是從數位到類比以及從聲音到視覺。在MIDI音樂中，聲音會被鄰近的音符影響，而我們的耳朵無法辨識太高或太低的聲音，我們也許會忽略音樂中的細節，但是樂譜將音樂的細節變得清晰，音符所構築的音樂羅括，也將無線基地台的辨識碼用類比的方式呈現。

Above all, the change in every step leads us to rethink how the fieldwork data are expressed and analyzed. In the future, I will collect more data and produce a series of textual, visual and acoustic works to explore the new methodology and new information of “the native’s point of view.”

從上面的轉變過程來看，可以發現每次的轉變，都可以讓我們去思考人類學的田野資料是可以有多樣化的表現方式，引領我們去思考這些田野資料的鋪陳與分析方式。在未來，我將會持續收集更多田野資料，製作一系列的文字、視覺與聲音作品以探索新的方法論與從新的研究方法中所獲得的土著觀點的新資訊。

the biography

The focus of my research is the interaction between material culture and human activity.



I had several opportunities to participate in archaeological fieldwork when I was an undergraduate student. I was fascinated by the archaeologists who created a study subject based on a hybrid of time and space by digging at various sites, and locating and categorizing the remains using horizontal grids and vertical layers via a soil color chart. Although the archaeologists focused on the analysis of the remains found, without regard to the visual aspect of the archaeological discovery progress, their grids and layers system made a great impression on me.





Based on the kinship courses I have taken, I learned about the house society theory proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss led us to rethink how a house as a material culture helps anthropologists to explore the visible and invisible relationships and activities in societies. For my B.A. thesis, I attempted to analyze the phenomena of multiple figures of one Mazu goddess in Taiwanese Mazu folk religions utilizing the house concept. I replaced temples for houses and used incense burners as the medium for figures sharing body substances. This attempt aimed to present the connection between identity and objects via “temples as houses” to understand how believers perceived the relations between Mazu figures. At the same time, for my NSC project, I continued to develop a house study via the study of international spouses living in rural villages. In that project, I noticed that sharing food and kinship duties were the main keys to converting foreign spouses to members in the family and house. During this period, I was training myself to think broader, beyond the kinship aspect of the house society theory.







To expand my knowledge and abilities for my postgraduate study with interdisciplinary collaboration, I enrolled in psychological linguistics courses in a graduate institute of linguistics to explore the connection between external presentation and internal logic. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory, proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is a key concept that I learned from the courses in that it links objects under different categories via breaking the boundaries using the mapping principle. The mapping principle is a rule which connects the Target Domain (the idea or concept that is described) to the Source Domain (the object applied to describe the Target Domain). The Target Domain and the Source Domain are separated into different categories, so linguistics looks for attributes that are shared by both to understand the mapping principle. In anthropology, categorization is an important system in which the natives distinguish themselves from others, such as in Huang Ying-Kuei’s study concerning the Bunun’s food categorization system. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory aids in analyzing categorization and understanding how conceptual metaphors help natives configure information about the boundary between themselves and others. The house theory is similar to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, since people construct their identities based on food sharing and living in the same house. In my subsequent studies, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory was a fundamental method in discovering the connection between houses and other objects in societies.







My M.A. thesis focused on the construction of identities via house-related material cultures. I integrated my previous studies with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and created an archaeology project investigating a Paiwanese village and their abandoned settlement. I applied cultural layers to describe the migration of the tribes and the grids to locate their objects　(i.e., house, tomb, and settlement), which were connected by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Although the building sources had changed and the duration of the settlement was short because of multiple forced migrations, houses became the Source Domain for the identity metaphor. The reason houses became an abstract concept is the accumulation of migration stories about houses and their eventual separation from their tombs, where ancestors ceased living with the living physically and hence conceptually.







From my experience in anthropology studies, I have found shortcomings and restrictions in this methodology. Anthropologists obtain abundant information by staying at particular spots for long periods to investigate and study the daily life of natives as living biographies. Under those conditions, anthropologists are passive receivers and interpreters. The text is full of native terms creating an exotic atmosphere, and every culture seems different from other cultures. The result is that every culture is seen as independent, with a difficult-to-compare existence, and hence cross-cultural studies become a battlefield of vocabulary without holistic viewpoints. In contrast, I wanted to reverse this method of study to create a specific way to conduct cross-cultural researches. This shift is different from traditional anthropology, so I needed support from different disciplines to achieve my goal. At the same time, I found that contemporary art offered me a possible way to develop my experiment.







Grids and layers were applied by Josef Albers and Richard Paul Lohse to study the interaction between colours and to transform 3-D to 2-D, similar to the way archaeologists and anthropologists position objects in the field and convert their fields to text. After the work of these pioneers, grids and layers were widely adopted in the minimal and conceptual art movements. I referred to the works of different artists and adopted colours (layers) and grids as my tools to create a hybrid of time and space as my study subject.







My doctoral project involved visualizing Wi-Fi networks in London, Taipei, New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong to explore how individual networks construct urban landscapes and their identities. According to Le Corbusier, houses are machines in which we live. I reversed his idea, assigning Wi-Fi users as cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) living in Wi-Fi houses. Then I applied the house society theory to visualise Wi-Fi access points as houses with colours and grids to construct 3-D-based 2-D landscapes. Colours were translated from unique Wi-Fi machine codes that represented individual Wi-Fi machines. The codes could also be tracked to the manufacturer, so the colours also offered a connection between individuals and capitalism. This work presents the different aspects of Wi-Fi machines as a house metaphor in their respective societies and extended anthropology to study material culture and human activity via multiple ways to reveal the connection between them.







我的研究興趣是探討物質文化與人類活動之間的關係。



當我還是大學生的時候，參加過好幾次的考古田野工作，這些對我而言是相當重要的經驗，因為這些工作讓我看到了考古學家並非只是研究發掘出來的物質遺留，而是藉由方格網線將所出土的物質文化確認其在發掘坑中的位置，再將其描繪到方格紙上;除了平面的空間定位外，考古學家也藉由整理出來的發掘坑的牆面所展現出來的文化層，從垂直的角度來賦予物質文化時間的屬性，最終方格與分層創造出了一個研究主體。雖然考古學家所關注的是物質遺留的分研究，較少關注到發掘過程的視覺層面，不過方格與分層的視覺意象始終給予我相當深的印象。



Archaeologists applied grid tool to locate the objects in The Deserted Village Project, Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland.

(http://www.museumsofmayo.com)



arc_03

Dureny-2, the section of culture layer, Dureny, Buryatia, Eastern Siberia, Russia.

http://xiongnu.ru/?page=38



sol03

Soil Colour Chart

(http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wd/courses/373F/notes/lec16sol.html)







因為大學的親屬研究課程，我接觸到了由Claude Levi-Strauss所提出的家屋社會理論。Levi-Strauss引領我們重新思考家屋做為一個物質文化，如何幫助人類學家研究人類社會中可見與不可見的關係與活動。為了讓自己更熟悉這個概念所可能的發展，我在學士論文中將其運用在台灣媽祖信仰中的媽祖分身現象，將廟宇視為家屋，香爐做為身體物質的共享媒介，描繪出媽祖信仰中認同與物體之間的關係，以了解信徒如何感知不同媽祖分身之間的關係。同時，我也在進行國科會的大專生專題研究計畫，我也將家屋研究應用到在文化田野課程中在屏東萬金所看到的跨國婚姻現象，分析外籍配偶如何藉由共食與親屬義務成為”同一口灶”的家人。





在進入研究所之後，我選修了語言所的心理語言學相關課程，以幫助研究人類活動所產生的外在呈現與內在邏輯之間的關係。在這些課程當中，概念隱喻是我所學習到的最重要的概念，因為其指涉的是與文化脈絡相關的隱喻，這部分的研究的重要性在於語言學家試圖尋找存在於隱喻Target Domain(是被隱喻之物)與Source Domain (用以描述隱喻之物)之間的對應原則(mapping principles)。藉由對應原則可以理解為什麼該社會文化使用某一個Source Domain去描述屬於不同類別的Target Domain，這對於人類學家相當重要，因為在過去的研究當中顯示，如黃應貴對於布農人的可食與不可食的研究，分類是確認人我之間關係的重要依據，但是隱喻卻可以打破當中的界限，顯現了隱喻是人類重新組態(configure)其原本分類關係的重要工具，正如同家屋是社會中藉由共食、同居與想像，重新連結與區分人我界限。所以概念隱喻成為我之後研究當中重要的研究方法，藉以探究家屋如何成為其他物質文化的概念隱喻，用以建立人群的認同。





我的碩士論文是研究與家屋相關的物質文化，如何幫助人類建立認同感。我將我之前所做的家屋相關研究以及概念隱喻，整合於一個調查排灣族舊社並且進行發掘工作的考古計畫當中。應用了文化層描述了部落的遷徙，以及將方格網線的概念用以定位其重要的物件(家屋、墳墓與聚落)於概念隱喻的網絡之中。在這個研究當中顯示了，家屋從做為居住的物質文化，因為不斷遷徙(縱向文化層的累積)與從室內葬轉變為室外葬的空間定位的改變，家屋成為了時間與空間上的複合體，因而擁有了獨立且兼具實體與概念的存在。即使建築材料等實體物質改變了，但是其作為概念上的存在反而因為成為隱喻中的Source Domain而被強化。







在自己過去的人類學研究過程當中，發現了研究方法上的缺點與限制。人類學家可以藉由長期停留在特定的地點參與當地的日常生活，以及將當地人視為活的自傳進行研究，來獲取大量的資訊。在這樣的狀況之下，人類學家是被動的接收者與詮釋者。人類學家所產生的文本充滿了土著的詞彙，創造了異文化的氛圍，每一個文化都與另一個文化不同；人類學的跨文化研究最後往往淪為特定名詞的探索，而非全貌觀下對於不同文化的理解，結果使得每一個文化成為了獨特且無法被互相比較的存在。跟過去相反，我企圖反轉人類學家為主動的角色，去創造一個新的研究方法以進行跨文化的研究。這個轉變是與過去人類學的傳統相當不同的，我需要來自其他領域的的支援以達到我的目的，在此同時，我發現當代藝術提供了一個可行的方向以進行我的實驗。



方格與分層被Josef Alber與Richard Paul Lohse應用於探索色彩之間的互動與轉化立體的物品與風景轉化為平面創作，就如同考古學與人類學家定位田野中的物件關係，再將其立體的田野轉變為平面的文字資料一般。在Josef Albers與Richard Paul Lohse具有開創性的作品之後，方格與分層也被極簡與概念藝術廣泛採用。我參考了不同藝術家的作品，最後採用了色彩(分層)與方格作為我的創造時間與空間混合的研究主題的工具。



square

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square – Nowhere, 1964.







1389-1

Richard-Paul Lohse:

"Fünfzehn vertikale systematische Farbreihen mit violetten Diagonalen", 1975





我的博士論文研究計畫是視覺化倫敦、台北、紐約、芝加哥與香港的無線網路，並且探索個別的網路如何構成都市風景以及個人對於無線網路的認同感。Le Corbusier認為房屋就像是我們的居住機器，我翻轉其想法，假設無線網路使用者如同人機混合體(cyborg)居住在無線網路家屋當中。我在這些城市背著電腦收集無線網路，將自己轉變為人機混合體的無線網路土著觀察都市中的無線網路；再利用資料庫將收集到的龐大資訊予以即時分類，這些資訊是可以被重複驗證與應用不同方式在予以分類。與此同時，我應用了家屋理論，以及色彩與方格視覺化無線網路基地台，如同家屋以建立一個立體空間為主的平面風景。色彩是轉化自無線基地台獨一無二的辨識碼為網頁的色碼，以代表每一個無線基地台。透過辨識碼我們可以知道其製造廠商，所以由辨識碼所轉化的色彩連結了個人與資本主義。這個作品呈現的無線基地台作為家屋隱喻的不同面向，延伸了人類學透過不同的方法揭露物質文化與人類活動的的連結的研究取向。



home (1).jpg

The individual Wi-Fi Access points in New York





tp.png

Taipei Wi-Fi Landscapes



出版刊物

2013 Landscapes on Internet Networks. Visual Studies Reader, Routledge

(forthcoming).



2011 London Wi-Fi Landscapes (digital book), San Jose: EZREAD INC.



2011 Exploiting inter-sample information and exploring visualization in data mining: from bioinformatics to anthropology and aesthetics disciplines.In Kimito Funato & Kiyoshi Hasegawa (Ed.), Knowledge-Oriented Applications in Data Mining (pp. 411-430). Rijeka: INTECH. (co-author with Kuan-Ming Lin)



2010 The Wi-Fi Cyborg. Cyborg Subjects, Volume 0, Online Journal.



2008 Wi-Fi Colour in Real World and Cyberspace: Cyborg Identity in Urban Wi-Fi Networks. International Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp.273-290.



2005 House and conceptual metaphor : a social boundary study of the Kuskus village in Pingdong county, M.A. Thesis, National Taiwan University, Unpublished.



2005 旅行、家屋與記憶-以屏東縣牡丹鄉高士村的物質文化硏究為例, 人類學的全球化與在地化硏究論文集; 台北,台灣國立臺灣大學文學院人類學系。



2001 在臺的外國太太—以屏東萬金的人類學研究為例, 人類與文化, 06/2001; 台北，台灣國立臺灣大學文學院人類學系系學會。





參加會議

2010 Wi-Fi Networks as Materialized Media, BSA Annual Conference - The British Sociological Association from 7th to 9th April 2010, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK.



2009 Wi-Fi Colour in Real World and Cyberspace: Cyborg Identity in Urban Wi-Fi Networks, 2009 International Conference on the Arts in Society from 28th to 31st July 2009, Venice, Italy.

2009 Wi-Fi colour in real world and cyberspace: cyborg identity in urban Wi-Fi networks in Taipei and Hong Kong, SEAA & TSAE Taipei 2009 Conference From 2nd to 5th July 2009, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.



2008 Colourful life in cyberspace and the real world, Work in Progress: PVAC PhD Symposium on 28th May 2008, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.



2004 旅行、家屋與記憶-以屏東縣牡丹鄉高士村的物質文化硏究為例, 國立台灣大學人類學系與中央硏究院民族學硏究所合作培訓計畫成果發表會, 台灣大學，台北。



2002 外國太太在台灣－以屏東萬金為例的親屬研究, 第三屆人類學相關系所研究生論文發表會, 5月24-25日，清華大學月涵堂，台北。





線上文章

2011 Visualizing Wi-Fi Network via House Society Theory, http://www.metamute.org/en/news_and_analysis/visualizing_wi_fi_network_via_house_society_theory_1



2011 Participant observation and data visualization, http://www.metamute.org/en/news_and_analysis/participant_observation_and_data_visualisation





音樂

2011 London Wi-Fi Landscape, http://www.amazon.com/London-Wi-Fi-Landscape/dp/B004YXQI1E, Cuyahoga Falls: SongCast Distribution.



2011 Tube and Wi-Fi Sound in Music, http://official.fm/tracks/266727



2011 Wi-Fi London - ver. 4, http://official.fm/tracks/280240



2011 Beats in The Grid, http://official.fm/tracks/280674







影像

2010 London Urban Wi-Fi Landscape Music, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziXJy_hO9k



2010 London Wi-Fi walking, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAOINa5VjZk



2010 The sound of step, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMu1S5HvZBU



2010 New York Wi-Fi Landscape, http://vimeo.com/16345994



2010 Wi-Fi trip, http://vimeo.com/17010261







作品

2011 London Wi-Fi Scores, http://www.saatchionline.com/art/Mixed-Media-Found-Objects-London-Wi-Fi-Scores/160262/1311707/view



2009 Group By Cites, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/choose_city.php



2009 Colour in different forms, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/



2009 "Cyborg in Wi-Fi London" Performance and Exhibition, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/cyborg_exhibition.php



2009 Wi-Fi in New York, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/ny.png



2009 Wi-Fi in Taipei, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/tp.png



2009 Wi-Fi in London, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/ln.png



2009 Wi-Fi in Leeds and Hong Kong, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/urban_image/lk.png



2009 Colour animation, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/wireless/en/colour_show.php
2007 Colorful Network--- Wireless Art Project, http://fireant.itaiwan.net/wireless/en/