Institute For The Future

RFID taken up by artists

WIRED News has a short roundup of artists that are using RFID in their work. Many of the examples are fairly straightforward: an otherwise dumb object is tagged and it triggers some digital experience, like a movie or a sound. My favorite ideas are those that truly play to the basic size and power benefits of RFID, like this one called Urban Eyes. The artists tag pigeons, station RFID readers throughout the city, and somehow link up to close-circuit security monitors to track patterns of movement. Artists and hacker-developers are inevitably the earliest users of any new technology, and are a constant source of early indicators as to how a technology might be used further down the road.