Art and the Mobile Phone
March 11th, 2007 | by jg3 |
Today I went up to Baltimore to see the exhibit at the Contemporary Museum called CELL PHONE: Art and the Mobile Phone. These are my notes on what I saw and thought about it all.
Aside from getting ensnared in St. Patrick’s Day Parade detour traffic (getting started a little early, eh McIrishness?), the trip up there was pretty smooth. Once got there I found the place, well, about typical for an urban art gallery. The exhibit had a phone number you could dial (a 703 number, by the way) and a voice would explain each exhibit to you. Kind of an interesting twist on the recorded museum tour that I really liked.
The first thing I came to was a cell phone chandelier (Lustre, by Beatrice Valentine AMRHEIN), which didn’t strike me as terribly practical but an interesting way to use about forty tiny LCD screens all cycling video clips. Calculating the cost of all those new neato phones, I would be tempted to go with something more like crystal in a more art-deco style, but I digress.
Beyond that there was a whole series of phones playing short videos (with accompanying audio available on headsets) that I didn’t have time to watch each because of that damn traffic. That may well have been one of the best parts of the exhibit. Or maybe I think that because I didn’t get to watch them. Shouldn’t A/V should be A/V regardless of which screen you might choose to view it on?
Then I found a video documenting a gathering that happened at some other place and time where people in the room sent text messages to a computer and the computer use that information to generate graphics and tinkle-y flow-y ambient music. I thought that was pretty cool, but not too much of a leap beyond Peep the network auralizer.
Just beyond that, there was Cell:Block which was a square room with a square door and a couple of square seats in front of a square wall upon which a 5 x 5 square of smaller cellphone-video-camera-quality video images were projected while being mixed with an image of the activity in the room. I didn’t quite understand this one. Was the point that with the proliferation of cellphone video cameras we’re all in some big social panopticon? I’m being watched? Believe me, I already knew that. There are signs all over the Baltimore downtown area reminding me that I’m being constantly monitored by video cameras.
Next I came to thing that struck me as a sort of postsecret-like idea you might call textfear. On a wall there was a number projected to which I was instructed to send a text message telling what I fear. Beneath the number was the image of a cute girl and presumably her fear: “Getting squished by a big, purple monster.” I will note that the message had better spelling, capitalization and punctuation than any text message I’ve ever sent or received. I sent a message with my fear, but the projection on the wall didn’t change during my visit. I presume this is collecting fodder for some future exhibit.
Then I came to what basically amounted to an explanation — maybe an advertisement — of this thing called Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit. I won’t try to explain it, I’ll let you follow the link if you’re interested, but I’ll say that this kind of turns the privacy wonks’ argument around and uses it for input in rather artistic way of understanding interpreting the environment and communicating about it with each other. If that sounds a little cheese-artsy (chartzy?), I’ll remind you that I was in an art exhibit in a museum and I’ll say that this was easily the most artistic (in the true sense) idea in the exhibit. Look, wireless communication is real and it isn’t going away, it is becoming more pervasive. Privacy worries are valid concerns, and the security of personal wireless communications is a topic that we are only beginning to explore as a society. Some thoughts on this that are my own and not exactly the point of the TSG presentation: What might we lose if we succeed in securing all of our communications? What is the wireless equivalent of a postcard? When a portable cassete player was all you could carry with one arm, new music could be heard and experienced by just walking through the city. Now everyone has earbuds and who can guess what a stranger is listening to on their iPod. Doesn’t the existence of the Zune mean that we know we’re losing something by not being able to overhear each other?
Enough of that. I then moved on to a video that described work in 2003 by Blast Theory called Uncle Roy all around you. They talk about a “game” in which there are street players and Internet players who are connected via a wireless link to a PDA and the street player takes commands from the Internet player and moves about the city searching for this Uncle Roy. The clunky PDA devices made it feel a bit dated, and with my mind already spinning new ideas for modern technology I felt like they should have been connected by a more natural interface than text on screens. It felt like a spy movie in at least one point, and I’m not certain that it did justice to its primary sociological question “at what point can you trust a stranger?” But the work and the medium is cool and I hope there’s more envelope-pushing work to come from this group.
Down a hallway lined with pixellated glyphs I came upon a little advert for CLIP-FM which is a clever little site that I will let you explore for yourself. Although it didn’t speak in that deep art kind of way, I loved the fact that this is an exploration of communication with word-pictures. That’s a topic I have talk about over and over and over. The “sentence” at left should communicate to you: I need coffee. Does it?
Finally I came to the room where Informationlab’s Cell Phone Disco was installed. This was really very cool although I worry that some of the blinky-blinkys were running low on the electron flow. At first I did not understand at all, but then after listening to the dial-in museum guide I understood that my celly signals were the wake-up call for these little red LEDs. I would love to see an installation like this extend along a moving sidewalk in an airport. I think they’re building just the perfect spot for this in Dulles right now.
Overall I wasn’t blown away by the exhibit, but I think that is because the technology is so new and so rapidly changing that we are not yet sure how to make use of it or what it means. The work shown here explores the ways that this technology can help us communicate, constrain, and entertain each other. What I thought was missing was any acknowledgment at all of the environmental impact of these practically disposable high-tech devices or any discussion on how this technology narrows or widens the social divides that tends to give humans so much trouble.
The museum is free (with a suggested donation of $5) so if you’re in the Baltimore area before April 22 you should take an hour or two and check it out.
UPDATE, March 17th: Washingtonpost.com has an article on the front page of the Style section reviewing this exhibit that gives a somewhat different viewpoint.
Filed under: gadgetry, images
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