The Sabbath Manifesto

Now, here’s a project that I can relate to:

Unplugging on the Sabbath - NYTimes.com

THE Fourth Commandment doesn’t specifically mention TweetDeck or Facebook. Observing the Sabbath 3,000 years ago was more about rest and going easy on one’s family — servants and oxen included.

Sabbath Manifesto

The Sabbath Manifesto is a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world.

We’ve created 10 core principles completely open for your unique interpretation. We welcome you to join us as we carve a weekly timeout into our lives.

Popular Science on Electro-hypersensitivity

The Man Who Was Allergic to Radio Waves

Your cellphone does not in itself cause cancer. But in the daily sea of radiation we all travel, there may be subtler dangers at work, and science is only just beginning to understand how they can come to affect people like Per Segerbäck so intensely

Full Signal: Documentary on Cellular Health Effects

Full Signal

Since 1997 and the onset of GSM telephony, more and more cellular antennas have been popping up in neighborhoods all around the world to support an ever-growing number of cell phone users.

In fact they have become so prolific in some parts of the world that they disappear into the landscape with the same subtlety as cars on the street. And those that don't 'disappear' are cleverly disguised as chimneys, flagpoles, or water towers.

Full Signal talks to scientists around the world who are researching the health effects related to cellular technology; to activists who are fighting to regulate the placement of antennas; and to lawyers and law makers who represent the people wanting those antennas regulated.

Filmed in Ten countries and Six US states, Full Signal examines the contradiction between health and finance, one of the many ironies of the fight to regulate antenna placement.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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...

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

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

Isolation from Cell Phones

My Phone Must die 01
Originally uploaded by letsmakeart

Here is a list of posts on textually.org for the tag “isolation from cell phone ideas,” which date back to 2005. Emily Turrettini of Geneva, Switzerland keeps three different blogs on aspects of mobile phones and mobile content. You can see that this is a recurring idea in creative works. There is a pervasive ambivalence about these devices that intrigues me - directly related to my own ambivalence, of course. It is the aspect my mind returns to again and again...

textually.org: Isolation from Cell Phones ideas

Spectral Ecology

I am working on a long post about the Data Forensics workshop I attended last week, but my pictures are trapped on my camera for the moment (lost cable.) In the meantime, I just had to post this picture of me with the WiFi antenna I built from a juice box. The process was quite a bit more persnickety than I had imagined it to be.

Siv has uploaded a lovely gallery of photos she took at the workshop.

Data Forensics [in the landscape]

For the next three days I will be here:

Data forensics [in the landscape]

A practical workshop with Martin Howse and Julian Oliver.

With an emphasis on the active construction of hardware and software apparatus, the Data forensics workshop will apply practical tools, techniques and theory to analyse [un]intentional data emissions within the city of Oslo.

First Mobile Misuse?

Another quote from Constant Touch points toward SMS as being the first major misuse of the mobile phone:

Text messaging was an accident. No one expected it. When the first text message was sent, in 1993 by new Nokia engineering student Riku Pihkonen, the telecommunications companies thought it was not important. SMS – Short Message Service – was not considered a major part of GSM. Like most technologies, the power of text – indeed the power of the phone – was discovered by users. In the case of text messaging, the users were the young are poor in the West and East.