TREEHOUSE: A Found e-mail Romance for iPhone

Networked_Performance — TREEHOUSE: A Found e-mail Romance for iPhone

TREEHOUSE: A Found e-mail Romance designed for the iPhone in four Appisodes™:

GET THE SCOOP (NY) - New media producers First Fifteen [F15] are releasing the provocative, true e-mails of a love affair carried out 14-years ago during the advent of the Internet (to be enjoyed in the privacy of your own phone).

The Technium

Kevin Kelly on The Technium: Penny Thoughts on the Technium

I‘m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not using technology. We’re used to be that you define yourself by what you use now. You define yourself by what you don’t use. So I’m interested in that process.

Cellphone Timeline

Timeline: The Selling of the Cellphone -- and Warnings Unheeded - Interactive - NYTimes.com

Since 1984, when car phones came into fashion, they were quickly marketed to drivers as a means to mobile freedom. Studies would soon show that using a phone while driving could be a distraction for motorists. Still, the industry resisted legislative action to ban handsets in cars, as warnings about distracted driving went unheeded.

Build Your iPhone App

Red Foundry iPhone Apps

Now anyone can build a killer iPhone App! A quality iPhone app can cost as much as $50,000 to develop, but thanks to Red Foundry now you can do-it-yourself for just a few dollars per month. Give it a try for FREE NOW!

Anyone can use Red Foundry, and you don’t need to know anything about programming. If you have a web browser and fingers to click a mouse, then you already have everything you’ll need to build an iPhone app with Red Foundry.

Immobile on the Phone

Complaint Box | Immobile on the Phone - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

This is a city of people who are constantly on the move. But lately I have noticed many who are completely immobile. Their favorite places to stand are on the subway stairs, either at the top, bottom or halfway up; at times, they camp smack-dab in the middle of the sidewalk. Regardless of where these people choose to stop, they are all engaged in the same activity: talking on their cellphones. And while they chatter away, like statues newly bestowed with the gift of speech, the rest of us are obliged to perform something akin to interpretive dance to make our way around them.

ElectroSmog: Sustainable Immobility

ElectroSmog International Design Competition – ElectroBlog: News about the ElectroSmog Festival:

Today we issued the call for the international design competition for sustainable immobility. We invite young designers, artists and other interested professionals and advanced students in design and art disciplines to submit proposals for designs for ’sustainable immobility’.

ElectroSmog is a new festival that revolves around the concept Sustainable Immobility. The festival will introduce and explore this concept in theory and practice. With Sustainable Immobility we refer to a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

The exploration of Sustainable Immobility is a quest for a more sustainable life style, which is less determined by speed and constant mobility. A lifestyle that celebrates stronger links to local cultures, while at the same time deepening our connections to others across any geographical divide, using new communication technologies instead of physical travel.

Mobile Interaction Course Design

I’m working on the design for two different mobile interaction courses to be offered next year. One is a Flash/Actionscript class that will be taught next semester. The second is one that I started designing last summer that will be offered online next summer. It is a mobile interaction design course that is heavier on the theoretical and sociological considerations in mobile application use and creation. When I have the structures and content in place, I may post the syllabi.

Flash-built apps heading for the iPhone

Flash-built apps heading for the iPhone | Macworld

This will make it much easier for me to incorporate app development into my Mobile Interaction Design courses:

New features in the upcoming Flash CS5 Professional will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on the iPhone and iPod touch. Applications can target the iPhone OS 3.0 and later.

New Mobile Misuse Flickr Collection

Collection: Mobile Misuse

I am slowly getting the past, present and future projects organized so that I can get some new pieces made (besides the iPod drawings - which are addictive to make).

More iPod Drawings in Process

QR Code Sand Castle

Trends in Japan - CScout Japan Blog: QR Code Sand Castle, by Sinap

Can a mobile phone read a QR code created not digitally, but out of sand? This is a question that arose while communication “architects” Sinap Co. Ltd. were brainstorming new strategies for reaching customers in a world suffering increasingly from information overload. A QR code created by a natural substance, and one as fragile as sand, would make an impact, they thought. The question remained, would it actually be usable?

Software Art for the iPhone

iPhoneArt | Software Art for the iPhone

Noticing this shifting dynamic toward the mobile space, early pioneering web and software artist Lia began the website, iPhoneart.org, which aims to aggregate several artist-created applications that use the touch-screen and accelerometer functions of the devices in new and imaginative ways.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Rhizome article

Robert Whitman: local report

local report

Local Report is the latest in a series of communication media works that Robert Whitman has produced since 1972.

The basic structure of these works was for 30 people assigned to different parts of the city or calling area to call at five minute intervals and describe something they saw at the moment; these reports were then broadcast live. Whitman put the incoming calls directly on the air as they came in, his only intervention being to end the call when, as he puts it, “The caller has produced a coherent image.” Ninety calls over a thirty minute period produced the final work. The news reports capture the nature of a specific place and time, revealing it to audience and participants alike.

Mind Your Manners

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. “He was playing a racing game,” Mr. Hobbs said. “He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone.”

But, Mr. Hobbs added, “we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the business.”

iPhone Art Pool on Flickr

Lily Pads
Originally uploaded by suziq54241

Flickr: The Brushes Gallery – iPhone Art Pool

Great examples of what is possible with the Brushes app. It would be interesting to know how many of these paintings are actually done on top of photos. Some are obviously not.

The Hybrid Book

Pattie Belle Hastings: The Hybrid Book

I just returned from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts where I spoke at the Hybrid Book Conference. My panel was called “The Reciprocity of Books and Digital Media.” I spoke about “Mobile Misuse: the artistic subversion of mobile technologies in the creation of book-like experiences.”

Cell phone distractions impair recall

Cell phone ringtones can pose major distraction, impair recall

The study includes an experiment in which Shelton poses as a student seated in the middle of a crowded undergraduate psychology lecture and allows a cell phone in her handbag to continue ringing loudly for about 30 seconds.
Students exposed to a briefly ringing cell phone scored 25 percent worse on a test of material presented before the distraction.

Students tested later scored about 25 percent worse for recall of course content presented during the distraction, even though the same information was covered by the professor just prior to the phone ring and projected as text in a slide show shown throughout the distraction. Students scored even worse when Shelton added to the disturbance by frantically searching her handbag as if attempting to find and silence her ringing phone.

Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers

Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers - NYTimes.com

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”

Vodafone | Receiver | Mobile creation – the Japanese way

Mobile creation – the Japanese way

Both psychologically and physically, young Japanese are never too far from their handsets and the connections to the world that come with the devices. For them, a mobile device is a constant companion, time-killer, game machine, television, organizer, wallet, music player and communicator. In short, it's not terribly necessary to own a PC to be connected digitally, so when the creative urge strikes, the mobile generation uses the tool most comfortable to them: their handsets.

The sneaky moves of anti-social smartphone users...

In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we're having right now is less interesting than what we'll tweet about it later.

Storytelling Pictures

I have uploaded photos of the Tactical Nomadic Storytelling Demo to Flickr.

Mobile Advocacy Resource

Mobiles in-a-Box

Welcome to Mobiles in-a-box: Tools and tactics for mobile advocacy

Mobiles in-a-box from the Tactical Technology Collective is a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides and case studies designed to help advocacy and activist organisations use mobile technology in their work.

Mobiles in-a-box is designed to inspire you, to present possibilities for the use of mobile telephony in your work and to introduce you to some tools which may help you. After reading the material in this toolkit you can expect to be able to design and implement a mobile advocacy strategy for your organisation.

Tactical Nomadic Storytelling

Tactical Nomadic Storytelling
Pattie Belle Hastings

World Storytelling Day, March 20, 2009 (spring equinox)
Tactical Nomadic Storytelling will start at 6:30 pm (sunset)
at the Kunstnernes Hus and then depart for wanderings
and tellings around the city of Oslo.

Atelier Nord
Wergelandsveien 17, N-0167 Oslo Norway

TNS (for short) is an art project that combines live storytelling and props with mobile digital media (visual and audio). Pattie Belle Hastings is currently in residence at Atelier Nord creating a mobile storytelling projection unit and a series of short stories that combine video/animation, audio, mobile devices and live performance. These digital live art experiences are designed to be performed strategically and spontaneously at tram stops, T-Bane stations, corners, alleys, bathrooms - virtually any spot on the street or any unexpected place around Oslo.

Keeping Household Electronics Out of the Landfill

The Green Home - Keeping Household Electronics Out of the Landfill - NYTimes.com

AMERICANS discarded 2.25 million tons of computers, printers, cellphones and other electronics in 2007. About 82 percent ended up in landfills. The Green Home called up Jason Linnell, the executive director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling, a nonprofit group based in West Virginia, to find out how we can recycle our old gadgets instead.

Silence = Productive Elation

Busy working at Atelier Nord on one of my Mobile Misuse components. Pictured: My Mobile Projection Unit... more info to come...

140 Characters in Search of Some Meaning - NYTimes.com

Letter - 140 Characters in Search of Some Meaning - NYTimes.com

What are the implications of my feeling a sense of connection with someone I don’t really know (a TV celebrity) through his sharing with me that he is done with rehearsal and about to have a bagel before the show? What’s missing in our more immediate day-to-day lives that this would draw us in?

Mobile Drawings = Drawing on the Mobile

I have started an experiment of making drawings with free applications for my iPod Touch. This ties into a larger “Return to Drawing”* experiment as the mobile component. The plan is to draw a few pictures on the Touch every week and document the process/progress on Flickr.

My iPod drawings on Flickr

*I’ll post more about starting to draw again on performing the art...

QRcode Art

Sensitive Rose, mobile/net artwork by Martha Gabriel

SENSITIVE ROSE is an interactive compass rose formed by mobile tags (QRcodes) that map people’s desires. The interactions happen via cell phones or mobile devices and the results can be seen in a large screen projection (or in computer screens at www.sensitiverose.com/rose.php).

The work intention is to ‘navigate’ in the desires of the people, in a secret way, through a ciphered poetics of tags, which cannot be deciphered with naked eyes.

The interaction happens via mobile devices by scanning the QRcode on the right or accessing the URL http://www.sensitiverose.com/m/. The interactor must choose what he/she wants from life. After interacting, the effect can be seen in the Sensitive Rose (www.sensitiverose.com/rose.php). The desire is mapped as a colored dot on the screen next to the tag related to it. The tag (QR code) is re-generate with the name of the interactor and his/her desire, codifying a text like: 'Joe wants Love'. Each desire is mapped in a different color, like red for love, white for peace, yellow for money, and so on. The tags are generated after each interaction and when the relevance of desires changes, the whole compass rose changes as well to represent it.

The Mobile Misuse Manifesto (early draft outline)

(a work in process on the design and development of interactive technologies)

"We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror."
- Marshall McLuhan, 1967

Manifesto Section 1

1. Choosing to be “lost” or “disconnected” is an option.
2. Time is finite, whatever is implemented must be worth the value of the time invested. (development & use)
3. The planet is finite, whatever we develop or buy reduces it.
4. Whatever device we say “Yes” to means “No” to something else in our lives.
5. Disappointment is intrinsic in our experience of new technologies.
6. The malfunction and arrogance of constantly changing technologies must not be overlooked.
7. Technology may be inevitable, but our use of it is not.
8. Refusal is an option.
9. Failure as an option.

Subset A

1. If you build it, they might not come.
2. If you build it, they might come and then leave.
3. If you build it, they might all come and overwhelm the system.
4. If you build it, it will be obsolete in a matter of months, weeks, days, or minutes.
5. If you build it, you will have to build it again and again and again.
6. If you build it, someone else may have already done it (and better).

(feedback appreciated)

Preliminary Mobile Projector Play

Wii Project(or) from Rolf S. on Vimeo.

This is Rolf Steier, one of my Fulbright colleagues, demonstrating the possibilities of a mini-projector connected to a Nintendo Wii using the Wiimote Whiteboard capabilities. Rolf is researching the incorporation of mobile devices into children’s learning experiences - particularly museums. This is tangentially related to the project I am working on using mobile projectors, so I need to keep this in mind for possible future iterations... although I wouldn’t want to have to lug around a laptop for street performances, though...

more info and links on Rolf’s blog

Telephone Trottoire

I mentioned the Tantalum Memorial art installation in a previous post and now there is an interesting interview with one of the artists, Graham Harwood on Rhizome: Rhizome | Interview with Graham Harwood

The installation is on view at transmediale in Berlin this week and it’s one of eight projects to win the transmediale 2009 Award.

Life Locative

From Wired: I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle

Top Kitchen Toy?

Top Kitchen Toy? The Cellphone - NYTimes.com

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.

It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

Volda Mobile Media Workshop

Smart Mobs and Mobile Media Workshop
A 3 Day Mobile Social Networks ThinkTank and Prototyping Workshop








The first thing we want to do is get to know ourselves better:
Click Here to take survey

Smart Mob Web Tour

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
A Website and Weblog about Topics and Issues discussed in the book

Wikipedia on Smart Mobs

Improv Everywhere Urban Prankster

Zombie Walk

Wikipedia on Zombies

Google Pics of Zombies

Zombies on Flickr

mobileactive.org: A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide

Smart Phones for Smart Mobs

Mobile Applications: The Next Big Thing In Mobile Marketing?

iPhone App Store

Locative Media

Wikipedia on Location Based Media

Wikipedia on Locative Media

Location-based mobile phone games

Tools for Actions: What You Can Do With the City
presents 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world

Text + Ferry =

Nesodden Ferry, the 5:32 pm from Aker Brygge to Nesodden, 13/02/09

Text messages and phone calls add psychological aspect to warfare in Gaza | World news | guardian.co.uk

Text messages and phone calls add psychological aspect to warfare in Gaza | World news | guardian.co.uk

"Hamas fires threatening text messages at Israeli mobile phones while Israel bombards Palestinians with menacing phone calls"

Gaza + SMS