The listserv empyre is having a discussion this month with Mobile Media artists.
Mobile Media are increasingly present in our daily life because networks are more flexible and widespread. Currently, connecting is not only about accessing something that is /not here/, but also about moving along with the flow. /From here to elsewhere/: beyond browsing (which was the Web approach), towards physical traces of relational data. Real time maps of cities allow people to exchange and retrieve information based on its location. GPS games explore the possibilities of mixing urban and data landscapes. Mobile phones become moving infotainment platforms. By using such devices, our culture is shifting even further towards nomadic procedures that blur the boundaries between frontiers and stable knowledge.
Space becomes an important category, since making sense of this continuously moving and interweaving collections of text, image, sound, video and binary depends on an understanding of their trajectories. But there is a dark side of this moon: such devices allow tracking and surveillance, making their user more and more exposed. RFID tags are, probably, the most evident example of a new, distributed panoptic. This month, Paula Roush, Joanna Callaghan, Luis Silva, Heather Corcoran, Marina Vishmidt and, time permitting, Lucas Bambozzi will discuss how mobile media is affecting our culture.
You can sign up to participate or lurk at the empyre list. They have great themed discussions every month but for some reason the website hasn’t been updated for a while. 🙁 You can check out the archives though. Here is the listing of the invited guests (though everyone can discuss):
PAULA ROUSH (pt/uk)
Brought up in the favelas of Lisbon, joined the International Red Corps to access education and research mobile strategies of display and mediation (http://www.msdm.org.uk). Having travelled worldwide in high impact rescue operations, she is currently on reserve to integrate the portuguese troops in the south lebanon UN settlements> her aim is to develop a locative media lab with open access to satellite photography tools and other geo-sensitive data across the arab world. To counterbalance her interest for the visual panopticon, she is now developing: what are we doing whats happening to us what needs to be done I prefer not to, a collective archive of tactical audio that will be broadcast during ear appeal at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse
(http://kunsthalle.wuk.at/7e/frame.htm) and arphieldRecordings, a podcast of the London undeground (http://www.odeo.com/channel/85358)LUCAS BAMBOZZI
His works have been shown in solo and collective shows in more than 30 countries. For many years he has coordinated activities in Brazil related to video and media-art such as the Electronic Art Festival. ForumBHZvideo, an electronic art festival and the video and media art department at the Museum of Image and Sound of Sco Paulo. He took part in early experiences on web-based art in Brazil [at Casa das Rosas gallery he created a pioneering net-art lab in 1995 and curated the exhibition Arte Suporte Computador, where Eduardo Kac presented his perfomance Time Capsule]. In the last three years he presented video-installations and interactive work in exhibitions such as the World Wide Video Festival, the 7th Havana Biennial and the 25th Sco Paulo International Biennial. He still makes single-channel videos [with the same enthusiasm he had at the end of the 80’s], as well as documentary films, web projects and live-video performance presentations. He is currently a MPhil candidate in the CaiiA-STAR Program (University of Plymouth – School of Computing). Recent exhibitions took place at Share Festival in Italy www.toshare.it, at Videoformes in France < www.videoformes.com> with a large retrospective of his single-channel videos and at HTTP Gallery in UK/London < www.http.uk.net>. His most recent curatorial projects were: SonarSound (2004) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake; Digitofagia (2004) at MIS, Nokiatrends (2005) at Anhembi. In 2006 Lucas is curating the Motomix Art & Music Festival at MIS/Mube, which involves a series of debates, multimedia installations and screenings programs.MARINA VISHMIDT
Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is interested in materialist aesthetics and the political economics of cultural production, with particular emphasis on art as vanishing mediator of both social change and the reinforcement of the commodity form. She is currently focusing on information-based art, situated technologies, urbanism, feminist media arts, conceptual art, Marxian theory, temporality, artists’ moving image, and errant modernisms. She is the editor of the NODE.London Reader: surveying art, technologies and politics (NODE.London, 2006), and is a frequent contributor to Mute magazine and MetaMute website, Untitled magazine, and a few other publications, including the second Producta Reader (Barcelona, 2007) and Art and Social Change (Tate and After All Publishing, 2007). She also publishes short fiction in small journals such as Guestroom and Ontophonie. She recently gave a workshop on domestic labour, free software and value production at Digitales, the bi-annual event for women and digital technologies organised in Brussels by Interface 3 and Constant. Other current projects include volunteering for Cinenova (Europe’s only women’s film and video distributor) and working in the local ‘arthouse’ video rental shop. She is hoping to get back into film/video production next year.JOANNA CALLAGHAN
Joanna Callaghan is an Australian living in London. She occupies various roles as artist, curator, producer and investigator. Recent projects include Mobile Dream Telling, an interactive performance shown during Sydney Design 06, Show me the Monet, a radio discussion program concerning the relation between art and the economy ( http://www.showmethemonet.org.uk ), KISSS – Kinship International Strategy on Surveillance and Suppression, an international meta-performance project (http://www.elastic.org.uk/KISSS) and Artists vs Hollywood an international touring program of films and video. She is director of heraclitus, a curatorial agency (http://www.heraclitus.org,uk) and lectures at the University of Bedfordshire (http://www.beds.ac.uk) and Artists vs Hollywood an international touring program of films and video. She is director of heraclitus, a curatorial agency and lectures at the University of BedfordshireLUIS SILVA
Luis Silva studied Social Sciences and is now completing his MA on Communication, Culture and Information Technologies and finishing a research project on net art. He has curated a few new media exhibitions, namely Online – Portuguese Netart 1997-2004, Source Code and Sound Visions. In 2006 he created the Lisbon node of the Upgrade!, an international network of gatherings concerning art, technology and culture. He is now developing and curating lx_2.0, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporbnea’s online program. Silva has written several reviews and texts addressing the issues of art and technology for various publications, namely Turbulence’s networked_performance, Rhizome and newmediafix.HEATHER CORCORAN
Heather Corcoran (CA/UK) is an independant producer/curator as well as Emergent Technologies Coordinator at SPACE Media Arts (http://www.spacestudios.org.uk) in London. Her current project at SPACE Media Arts, Tagged, is a year long programme centred around Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that has commissioned new work from four artists culminating in an exhibition opening in October ’06. Recently she has curated the game hack exhibition Controller at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto (http://www.interaccess.org), and worked with artist/programmer collective Goto10 (http://goto10.org). She is also an organizer of NODE.London (http://www.nodel.org).