Overview
- French artist Théo Champion, known as Rootkid, built the wall‑mounted piece to visualize local wireless activity as live bands of light.
- A YouTube demo shows faint daytime pulses that surge into bright, dense bands in the evening as nearby devices come online.
- The setup detects transmissions within roughly 30 meters, capturing traffic from the creator’s home and surrounding neighbors.
- Vibrating LED driver coils produce a hum whose pitch shifts with bursts of data, creating an unintended audio cue to signal intensity.
- Champion told The Register he wrote the control software in Python, spent about $1,000 on parts and fabrication, and is discussing Paris displays while remaining open to commissions.