Julian Bleecker

Born 1966 in the USA; BA in Electrical Engineering, MA in Computer-Human Interaction, PhD from the UC Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness Board with a dissertation on technology, culture and entertainment; Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division and Critical Studies Department of the School of Cinema-TV at the University of Southern California; residencies at Eyebeam Atelier, the Banff Center for the Arts, and has had projects shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image, Bitforms Gallery, Art Interactive, and Times Square.
Bleecker has been involved in technology design, the development of mobile and networked technology systems, and scholarly work studying the mechanisms by which technology design and innovation occurs. He explores the relationships between place and social engagement through the use of 802.11 «WiFi» technology. «WiFi.Bedouin» is a mobile, portable WiFi node that serves as a wireless communications node, allowing one to have a personal web server disconnected from the public Internet. «WiFi.ArtCache» is a WiFi-based repository of smart art objects that users can download to their WiFi-enabled laptops. «WiFiKu» is a project that constructs interpretive maps representing urban neighbourhoods based on Haiku constructed from the names of WiFi nodes in those neighbourhoods. «NetMagnet» is a spatial networking experiment that performs file-swapping amongst computers that are physically proximate.