The Next Step

The Mobile Drawings and Electric Finger have been the seed that sprouted into a new garden of research and practice. This new body of work is being documented at Drawing | Thinking.

Electric Finger

Electric Finger: an experiment in touch surface drawing

Our fingers are electric. They emit electromagnetic frequencies that allow us to interact with touch screen technologies. It’s called “finger capacitance” and it’s this conductive property of our fingers that makes capacitive touch sensing possible. Mobile devices, such as my iPod Touch, are designed to respond to the taps and caresses of my fingertips, providing access to necessary but mundane information or allowing for moments of unique creative exploration. For decades, it has been possible to draw with a computer using a mouse or stylus, but now we can carry electronic sketchbooks in our pockets with the tools for mark making at the ends of our arms.

TRACEY: Drawing and Visual Research, Loughborough University School of Art & Design, Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK

Urban Speaker

Urban Speaker: broadcast cell phone calls in public space

The Urban Speaker is an art installation that transforms public space into an instant stage for mass communication. This portable urban furniture allows people to broadcast their voice in public by calling a telephone number from their mobile phones.

The Urban Speaker resembles construction signage and blends in with its urban surroundings. It consists of a tripod with an amplified loudspeaker, smartphone, battery and a traffic sign. The signage instructs passersby to dial a phone number to speak in public. Users who place the call get an automatic answer and can speak their mind for sixty seconds after which the call is terminated. A QR (Quick Response) barcode on the sign allows some mobile phones to instantly access the urbanspeaker.mobi website for location, event and other details as well as quick dialing of the installation's phone.

Callspace / Redux

Callspace / Redux 09/30/10 – Machines With Magnets

Callspace is a digital arts installation that utilizes cell phone technology to network ambient sound from unpopulated, site-specific locations throughout a given area. Six cell phones are modified to run on solar power and answer automatically when an incoming call is received. The modified cellphones are then placed in their locations throughout the city, and connections are made between the cell phones and cellular telephones located in the exhibition space. The output of each telephone is wired directly to a dedicated loudspeaker housed in a monolithic speaker enclosure.

More Art In Your Pocket

Rhizome | Art In Your Pocket: iPhone and iPod Touch App Art

As the niche genre of software art expands beyond the web and into mobile devices, media artists are finding ways to integrate their work into a new form of business model. Instead of giving away your work for free on the web, Apple's iPhone and iTouch devices provide an ample platform for distribution (through the Apple App Store) and hardware support for novel ways to experience screen-based work. Since the App Store was unveiled last year, the over 30,000 available applications have taken the form of everything from mock cigarette lighters (Zippo's App) to mobile flutes (Ocarina) to utilitarian apps such as Urban Spoon (Restaurant finder) to social networking in physical spaces (Loopt). Noticing this trend, media artists who once found their free and limitless distribution platform through a desktop computer browser are now turning their attention and creative efforts toward the mobile space of the iPhone.

Art in Your Pocket

Rhizome | Art in Your Pocket 2: Media Art for the iPhone and iPod Touch Graduates To The Next Level

As the iPhone and iPod Touch become more saturated into a population of people who never would have used their phones for anything other than making calls, it seems as if the chance for artists to create new work for the devices is becoming more commonplace and accepted. Even commenters in the AppStore have good things to say about art showing up in this context. One person said this of Snibbe's Antograph, "These apps are amazing and point the direction for the future of art, science, and technology. Soon these "ants" will be making music, operating on people, and stopping oil well leaks. What a great time to be alive." Another commenter hinted at the seemingly non-purpose of the Vanitas app, but how the design was still compelling enough for multiple visits, "Make no mistake, Vanitas is not a game even though it's made by a "game" company. There is no goal, no discernible narrative so - what is it? It's interactive entertainment. I found it terribly addicting." Maybe these forms of contemplative apps made by artists is exactly what is needed to change the driving force of the App Store and the ways in which mobile apps are marketed in the first place. Despite the rhetoric of Apple controlling access to its store and the apps featured there, overall, the mobile platform of the iPhone has begun to enable artists to get inspired to both revisit their old screen-based work and discover new forms of interactivity that these new platforms now enable.

By Jonah Brucker-Cohen

ElectroSmog International Festival for Sustainable Immobility

ElectroSmog

International Festival for Sustainable Immobility

March 18 – 20, 2010

The ElectroSmog festival is a critique of the worldwide explosion of mobility, and an exploration of the new forms of connectedness with others offered to us by network and communication technologies.

Our question is if these new forms of connectedness can help us to develop a viable new lifestyle less determined by speed and constant mobility, which is both ecologically and socially more sustainable.

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).

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

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.

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.”

Storytelling Pictures

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

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.

Silence = Productive Elation

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

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)