Nickolay Lamm

At this very moment, I'm surrounded by Wi-Fi. I can't see it, but I know it's there. If my life were a fantasy film, I would be able to wave a wand and make the Wi-Fi appear all around me in dancing waves of color. Since I'm a little short of magic right now, I'll have to settle for artist Nickolay Lamm's interpretations of what Wi-Fi looks like.

Lamm didn't just scribble some waves across photographs and call it done. He consulted with astrobiologist M. Browning Vogel on how Wi-Fi behaves. The resulting images were created to mimic the wave patterns, if only they were visible to the human eye.

This isn't the first attempt at visualizing Wi-Fi. In 2011, designers from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design created a series of Wi-Fi images by light-painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. The results are just as intriguing, though less colorful, than the images created by Lamm.

Lamm's images show different sub-channels as different colors. The results depict a world where Wi-Fi lays across the land like a blanket and sends waves beaming out in continuous curves. It gives you a sense that the unseen world of Wi-Fi is more than a bit magical.

Nickolay Lamm

(Via Vice)