Luis Hernan is like a modern day ghost hunter. Only instead of searching for lost souls, he’s looking for the technological apparitions that surround us every day. In Digital Ethereal, Hernan, a PhD student at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, has been investigating the invisible wireless infrastructures in order to glean a better understanding about how these wireless systems are designed and how we interact with them.

Digital Ethereal is part art, part industrial design and part technological inquiry. He began by designing a gadget called the Kirlian Device, named after Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, a 20th century scientist who developed the Kirlian photography technique. This technique, which visualizes electrical coronal discharges, has been used for various scientific purposes, but it’s most commonly associated with paranormal activities like reading auras.

The Kirlian Device Luis Hernan

Hernan’s device draws on that same idea, but the output is much more straightforward. The Kirlian Device is built out of birch plywood and houses an Arduino UNO board that’s connected to an Arduino WiFi shield. These components measure the strength of wireless signals and translate that data into various colors, which are then projected on a strip of LEDs. To visualize the wireless signals, Hernan would swing the device around and capture it through long exposure photography (usually anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes). Hernan himself faded away in the photographs giving the resulting images a rainbow-colored apparition-like appearance.

The images are fascinating from a visual point of view, but the most shocking thing about Hernan’s shots is how different signals can be in almost the exact same spot. You see blue (representing the weakest signal) blending into red (strongest signal) with a variety of colors in between. Our wireless signals are fickle; they reacting to our bodies and the various materials around us, which maybe doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s battled with Time Warner’s spotty wireless.

Still, seeing this data visualized is mesmerizing, and potentially useful. “If I hear the sound quality diminishing I know there’s something going on. You try to adapt to it, but there’s really no way to know what’s going on,” he says. "When you actually make this information visible, you at least have the opportunity to adapt these technologies to their specific needs.”