mobile_connections

Out of the galleries and off the screen.

mobile connections looks at the diverse ways in which artists are pushing the limits, and soliciting unexpected or unforeseen results, from communication media past and present, from the radio to mobile telephony and wireless LAN.

Just as recording enabled sound to be heard apart from the place and time of its creation and radio made possible remote listening, so a new generation of communication media is now reconfiguring perceptions of space and time, and transforming the nature of the art object and the musical or art event.

The emergence of locative media art, predictions of the imminent bursting of the 802.11 bubble, and the introduction of location based services for mobile phones have brought into focus a set of interests concerned with wireless, mobile and locative media, and have created a space that increasing numbers of artists are starting to explore.

The interest in wireless technologies lies not just in their being unplugged, but in the way they enable people to relate to place or location in different ways, and the questions they pose about open and closed networks. Similarly with mobile media the interest is not just in producing artworks for handheld devices, but in the kinds of communication and creative expression that emerge within networks with no fixed centre, but rather multiple, mobile nodes, how these respond to the location of the user or blur the distinction between the physical and virtual.

The panacea of openness and accessibility has not arrived. mobile connections will explore not just the aesthetic possibilities but also how the ideology of free and open communication contrasts with specific ways in which media are embedded in the everyday, the limits and possibilities that arise on the boundary between open and closed nodes, how communication media can be appropriated, and ways of intervening in systems of control.

The mobile connections curatorial theme has been developed for futuresonic04 and as a part of loca, a wider initiative exploring the shifting boundaries between art practice, the event and data-systems, by Drew Hemment, Director of futuresonic and AHRB Research Fellow in Creative Technologies at the University of Salford.