At 22:00 02/05/01 -0500, you wrote:
>(re) distributions is going to be very different and far more problematic.
>Do I just set up a series of PDAs and let people tap? I've got one person
>who does paintings on a Palm III who did a stellar large-format work. How
>do I merge his work with Matt's SMS documentation? It's going to be thorny.

interestingly, some of the mobile projects we're developing at the moment
look at location based-services triggered by information in real space. so
its probably easier to present this work in a gallery, and in fact you can
use the specific social ergonomics of the gallery space as a context for
the work.

this assumes that most visitors will have, say, an SMS-enabled mobile phone
(a pretty easy assumption to make in the UK), and therefore you can simply
display the keyword/access information in the gallery space, so that users
can then access the work via their own phones. that way, users' phones
become a gateway for the work triggered by information presented in a
specific location - in this case the gallery.

i'm far more interested in this form of location-based services, where
location is determined from the 'ground up' (ie by access information only
being viewable in selected real world location) than i am in the telco's
current hype for 'top-down' location services (where you are idientified as
a specific point on an abstract communications network).

The former privileges the users' actual location in existing social spaces,
such as an art gallery, and uses the ergonomic and social conventions of
these spaces as the context of the work. the latter treats the individual
(with their associated patterns of production and cosumption) as a point in
free space, and rarely makes a reference to the context of their actual
physical locations.

This means that the factors we tend to find most problematic about gallery
spaces in relation to new media - namely their historical presentation
rhetorics embodied in their architectures - become interesting contexts for
'site-specific' location based mobile projects.

i find mobile work more interesting at the moment for precisely this reason
- web-based work by comparison seems too rooted in a specific context (the
desk or home terminal) to be able to dal with these architectural rhetorics
without substantial changes in presentation modes.

finally, i'll mention something that Mark Tribe said in a rhizome panel
session about the Whitney Biennale in 2000. He mentioned the term
'net.installation' as a bifurcation of net.art practise that tried to deal
with the specific physical challenges of the gallery/museum space. I think
its a good term to use, as it gives us a vocabulary to recognise artists
that make work that is reliant on communication networks, but accomodates
the specific presentational rhetoric of the museum. a good example of this
would be ken goldberg's 'mori' - especially in its recent presentation as
part of steve dietz's 'telematic connections' exhibition.





-----------------------------------
Matt Locke
Artistic Director
The Media Centre, Huddersfield
www.test.org.uk