We were interviewed by Isabelle Picard for Découvrir : la revue
de la recherche. The articlewill be published in the March/April 2005 issue.
Montréal, Québec

We participated in the Mobile Digital Commons Network Design and Engineering Workshop hosted by the Banff New Media Institute.
December 13-16, Banff, Alberta

Île Sans Fil is a non-profit community group devoted to providing free public wireless internet access to mobile users in public spaces throughout Montreal, Canada. They use open source software and inexpensive commercial WIFI equipment to share broadband internet connections.

Users can use the internet in certain areas, or hotspots, if they have laptops equipped with a WIFI card. Île Sans Fil works with cafes, stores, community organizations, and individuals to make internet access freely available in public spaces.

Île Sans Fil believes that technology can be used to bring people together and foster a sense of community. In pursuit of that goal, they will be using their hotspots to promote interaction between users, show new media art, and provide geographically- and community-relevant information.

Will Straw is Associate Professor within the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is on the editorial boards of Screen, Cultural Studies, The Canadian Journal of Communications, Social Semiotics, Space and Culture and numerous other journals. He is the co-editor (with Simon Frith and John Street) of the Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, and (with Jody Berland and Dave Tomas) of Theory Rules: Art as Theory, Theory and Art (University of Toronto Press/YYZ Books, 1996). His articles on music, film and culture have appeared in several anthologies and journals. Currently, he is a member of a five-year research project on The Culture of Cities (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under their Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Program.) Will’s current research focuses on the print culture of scandal and exposé in the 1920s and 1930s.

Professor Lewis’ current research interests include ActiveText, a project developing new software architectures for writing, reading, displaying and performing interactive and dynamic text. Lewis has a long history of conducting collaborative research across disciplinary boundaries, directing hybrid teams of software designers, technology developers, social scientists, designers and artist within several industrial research labs including Interval Research and the Institute for Research on Learning. Prof. Lewis is also a member of the Hexagram Interactive Performance group and Senior Faculty with the Interactive Project Laboratory, a collaboration between the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Film Center, and l’Institut National de l’Image et du Son.