Junkspace is 13% Roman, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney, 3% Art Nouveau followed close by Mayan…
Rem Koolhaas, Content, “Junkspace”.

Tao did this photo and I like it a lot. It makes me think of the book “Learning From Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. They describe the commercial vernacular architecture of Las Vegas as symbolist architecture, “symbol in space before form in space” is the title of one of the first chapters.

The Middle Eastern Bazaar contains no signs, the Strip [Las Vegas’ main avenue] is virtually all signs. In the bazaar, the communication works through proximity. Along his narrow aisles, buyers feel and smell the merchandise, and the merchant applies explicit oral persuasion. In the narrow streets of the medieval town, although signs occur, persuasion is mainly through the sight and smell of the real cakes through the doors and windows of the bakery. On Main Street, shop-window displays for pedestrians along the sidewalk and exterior signs, perpendicular to the street for motorists, dominates the scene almost equally.
On the commercial strip the supermarket windows contain no merchandise. […] The vast parking lot is in front not at the rear since it is a symbol as well as a convenience. The big sign leaps to connect the driver to the store […] The graphic sign in space has become the architecture of this landscape. […] If you take away the signs away there is no place.

I think there are commercial reasons to represent wifi as points in space, as “hotspots” (it is a ridiculous word, ça fait bounton de fièvre), whereas it seems more obvious to represent it as an area, because it is airwaves moving away from an emitter or an antenna. If wifi signal is represented as an area then it is easy to imagine that several areas of signal can overlap, as it is very often the case. Points on the contrary do not represent this possibility of signals concurrency.

With wifi we do not need to go to some specific point in space to be connected. We can go in and out of some areas were we receive signal, being connected is a side effect of being somewhere. It is very interesting then to imagine ways of organizing information in space (a bit like a blog if we see a blog as a way to organize information in time).

p.s.: Mapblog by Nao Tokui is the sort of thing I was thinking of when I wrote “to imagine ways of organizing information in space”.

p.s.: anti-chambre.net has a spatial index.