Roland Graf: Internet of Shoes at ISEA2016 Hong Kong

This week, Stamps Assistant Professor Roland Graf’s artist collective Assocreation shows a first proof of concept of an experimental swarm light installation titled Internet of Shoes at the 2016 International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Hong Kong. This installation is part of an ongoing research project in collaboration with Lab 11, an embedded systems research group at the University of Michigan.

The Internet of Shoes builds on the power of self-organized mesh networks that connect people and their devices to each other without passing any centralized organization such as a phone of Internet provider. It is a first attempt to visualize data transmission and ad-hoc networks not just as a graphic on a screen, but as a visual effect on the street, where crowd interactions happen, unfiltered and in real time.