We are immersed in invisible radio waves, almost all the time. This is a matter of fact in every city or town, with scientific studies divided on the possible physical consequences. We can trace the visualisation of electromagnetic waves to analogue measurement devices, which treated this kind of information with an emotional kinetic measurement (the measuring needle going over a red line). Digital measurement devices on the other hand, are based on topographic maps that usually represent electromagnetic waves through the abstraction of figures and lines. The Architecture of Radio is an artwork in the form of an iOS app, developed by Richard Vijgen, which visualises radio waves by relying on the “global open datasets of cell tower, Wi-Fi and satellite locations”. Using GPS it shows a “ghostly” presence of waves, which become alive in the screen. The augmented reality effect it implements is aesthetically built to hide “the visible” (or the physical structure) “while revealing the invisible” (the waves).

 

Architecture of Radio