Bacterial Communication Inspires Artists To Design A Decentralized Wifi Network For Protestors
Earlier this week, Ars Electronica announced the winners of this year’s “Golden Nicas” in the Prix Ars Electronica media art awards. In the category “Interactive Art +”, the winners were Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera of Berlin University of the Arts, who designed a solution to make socially distanced protests more impactful. It’s called Bi0film.net and it’s inspired by the way that bacteria form networks and communicate with each other.
Hsu and Rivera noticed how social distancing measures during the COVID-19 pandemic had affected the way that people were able to practice acts of civil resistance, when banding together in a large crowd was no longer possible.
In the description of their award-winning project ”Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria”, they write, “bacteria, which were here long before us, have developed amazing technologies of distributed communication and self-organized collaboration.”
One example of that is the formation of biofilms, where micro-organisms group together on a surface to form a sheet that can eventually be seen by the naked eye. To create these large networks, individual bacteria communicate with each other in a process called quorum sensing, where bacteria pass on messages by sending out molecules to neighboring cells. The bacteria adapt based on how many messages they get back from other cells: If the network is crowded and there are a lot of other cells nearby, they receive a lot of molecules, which in turn can change how the bacteria behave.
In Bi0film.net, the communicating cells aren’t bacteria, but individual people holding umbrellas adapted to boost a WiFi signal. They based this on an open source project by Andrew McNeil, who previously shared how to create long-range wifi signals with an umbrella. Now, instead of bacteria sending molecules to each other to communicate how to form a biofilm, the network is formed of people working together to create a decentralized communication network with each other.
But there is another message in the Bi0film.net project: resistance. As Hsu and Rivera point out in their project description, bacterial resistance is usually discussed as something negative — something that makes it extra difficult to eradicate a disease, for example. But in human conflict situations, resistance can be a good thing, a way to drive change where needed. Hsu and Rivera say that their project “praises bacterial resistance in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war.” The umbrellas they chose for the project are deliberately yellow, as a nod to the yellow umbrella symbol of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.
Bi0film.net’s international theme, focus on social issues and inspiration from biology eventually landed it the Golden Nica award in the category “Interactive Art +” of the Prix Ars Electronica. The awards attracted over two thousand submissions across several categories representing different forms of digital media.
“Bi0film.net: Resist Like Bacteria” is currently on display at an outdoor showcase exhibition at Berlin University of the Arts.
