> The rapid uptake of the mobile phone, both in the West and
> increasingly in the global South, the proliferation of wireless
> networks, and the promise of pervasive computing in which networked
> devices become embedded in the environment around us has created a
> space that increasing numbers of people are starting to explore. But
> unlike the internet, which promised unlimited potential before being
> colonised by commercial forces, wireless networks are centralised and
> proprietary, access to DIY innovation denied. Highlighting the
> artificial scarcity that underlies the telecoms market, and the
> absurdity of selling off bands of the electromagnetic spectrum for
> short term gains, the Free Networks movement empowers people to build
> their own wireless networks, its goal not just to leak bandwidth but
> to establish an independent and free wireless infrastructure.


it is somewhat limiting when talking about art and location in relation
to technology only. Art requires a different understanding of itself
than that of the auratic other. The question would be what is
understood as art, rather than how can art potentially use new
technologies (or, in future, those not yet discovered). The latter
somehow implies that the use of technology is artless and needs the
artist to fill it up with art. Then, once an artist is using
technology, it suddenly is art. Magic!

- daily existence is dominated by commercial interests: Chinese cockles
collectors die in the Irish sea; home owners in Britain exploit the
explosion of rent and house prices; social housing is sold off to
aspiring home owners; and, well, Telecoms companies deny DIY
innovation. Each require their respective adequat political responses.
Art could be one of them if it is developing from a position where
location and transformation is no longer an issue. Location is a
physical given, is a property of the human being in relation to the
object of art or its frame (be that the picture frame or the mobile
phone) but not of the work of art itself. In that sense, focussing on
technology in relation to art and location runs risk of talking about
the picture frame rather than the picture.

- the found object is no different from the found painting; the silence
of Marcel Duchamp doesn't mean anything. If mobility is an issue
relating to the use of a mobile phone for a work of art, it stops being
different from, say, kinetic or other art, that just somehow doesn't
sit on a plinth or in a frame, or is sited specifically in some space
or other. One work sits in a phone, another in a frame - but that
doesn't make it necessarily different.

And yet another work refers to one's location, which can be
geographically determined with a GPS. Now art engages with a GPS
device; it runs through a satellite link; it somehow adds spice to the
bland taste of the gadget? Physical perception of space is given added
conceptuality through the work of art that is powered by electricity -
does it matter?

The form of the work of art matters, though, as it is in its
materiality of communication and of exchange in which it manifests
itself (or is given an opportunity to manifest itself), and where its
properties can be discussed. That is, that location is no longer its
prime concern - a free network is a political response that intends to
establish an alternative structure to a commercial one. As a structure
it seems no different to a picture frame, if the understanding of what
art is doesn't change from that of the auratic other to one of a more
friendly companion.

Jorn Ebner