Dear List,

Here are some introductions from Drew Hemment which may help the 
discussion along: do we agree with these definitions? Do we agree with 
his definitions of locative and mobile?

Yours,

Beryl


Mobile Connections

The Mobile Connections strand of the Futuresonic04 festival explores 
new horizons in wireless and mobile media, and looks at the diverse 
ways in which artists and technical innovators 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. The aim is to look beyond the technologies themselves towards 
issues to do with participation, perception and process they raise, 
through the exhibition, live events, conference, workshops and 
interactive experiences in the city streets.

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 technologies are now reconfiguring 
geographical, cultural and perceptual space, and transforming the 
nature of the art object and the art event. Mobile Connections seeks to 
sketch the outlines of emerging artforms that are coalescing around 
artists, programmers and DIY technologists who are responding to new 
technical tools by asking what can be experienced now that could not be 
experienced before, and that force us to reassess the ways of 
representing, relating to and moving in the world that have gone 
before. Some are exploring how the mobile phone might be transformed 
into an instrument in the way that radio and the turntable were in the 
20th Century, examining how wireless technologies affect our daily 
lives, or seeking to make visible and audible the signals and 
transmissions that fill the air around us. Others are looking at how 
mobile technologies can take art out of the galleries and off the 
screen, the potential of interfaces unfettered by wires and cables for 
performance or interaction, and the kinds of communication and creative 
expression that emerge within networks with no fixed centre, but rather 
multiple, mobile nodes.

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.

The marketing of commercial wireless networks and third generation 
mobile phones has a now familiar hollow ring, but outside the corporate 
technology push, grass roots movements are opening up horizons not 
foreseen by the marketers, often setting the pace in technical 
innovation. The area that is perhaps generating the most excitement, 
and that has caught the imagination of a new generation of artists, is 
the emergent field of Locative Media. Rather than distance becoming 
irrelevant, the ability to determine location has emerged as central 
with wireless and mobile technologies, for the delivery of contextual 
information, or to engage in proximity and co-location. Assigning data 
with spatial coordinates so that it can be accessed from particular 
points, Locative Media explores how networked mobile devices, when 
combined with positioning technologies such as GPS, may be used for 
social communication and organisation, or for artistic interventions in 
which geographical space becomes its canvas.

The question of location within art is by no means new. All art engages 
in location to some degree, in the way that it articulates contextual 
meaning ˆ even the found object is marked by the absence of the 
location from which it was drawn ˆ or that it responds to the space 
created by gallery and frame. Locative Media explores social 
applications and the expressive trace as well as the straight forward 
placing of data through a prior abstraction, reducing location to a set 
of abstract digital coordinates. Mobile Connections will also explore 
how location is approached in other artforms, to investigate how 
Locative Media‚s concern for place and location may inform or be 
informed by issues such as material embodiment and the resonant 
qualities of a space. It will feature sound and media art projects that 
enable place and the urban environment to be experienced in different 
ways, including the Location site specific sound installations, and 
projects that enable the city to be navigated through sound.

Drew Hemment
April 2004
www.futuresonic.com


Mobile Connections themes

Mobile Connections seeks to balance artistic visions that open new 
perspectives on the technologies and their social implications, 
hands-on tool building sessions, and discussions of the processes 
involved in producing art for wireless environments. The artists and 
projects featured explore a number of interrelated themes:

Radiation is all around us
In SIGNAL_SEVER! - TRANSIGNAL 1 musicians, visual artists and high 
frequency and satellite telecommunications experts explore the radio 
zones of the electromagnetic spectrum, and Telenono by Rupert Griffiths 
brings the radiation that is all around us into view by creating a 
negative image - an installation built to look like a phone box that is 
sealed off from all radiation, offering true radio silence.

Wireless World
Disembodied Voices by Jody Zellan is a web based project examining the 
connected - but disembodied - voices that populate modern 
telecommunications, and Auto Mobile by the Center for Knowledge 
Societies is a short film that tracks changes in the use of mobile 
phones by autorickshaw drivers within the urban culture of Bangalore.

Art Unplugged
the-phone-book Limited and Tim Cole of the Tao Group explore the mobile 
phone as a creative medium - taking the limited technical resources as 
a creative starting point, or pushing the frame to generate high 
quality live sounds on-the-fly - while Katherine Moriwaki explores ad 
hoc networking, where connections are made directly between individual 
devices, so that data can hop from one to another without needing to be 
routed through a central point.

Wireless Interface
Come Closer by squidsoup explores how wireless technologies offer 
non-restrictive interfaces that enable interaction free from cables and 
physical connections, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau discuss 
the use of magnets to introduce a sense of tactility and touch at the 
interface between the body and the nearest node, Schminky explores 
gaming in wireless environments, and the Soundbeam sensing technology - 
also featured in the futureDJ event - offers a gestural interface for 
composition and performance.

Free Networks
Free Networks pioneers Consume demonstrate how to build your own 
wireless network, while RICHAIR2030 by TAKE2030 and Wi-Fi Hog by Jonah 
Brucker-Cohen explore the boundary between open and closed nodes, and 
the limits placed upon access to the supposed panacea of openness and 
accessibility, one through a performance set in a fictional future in 
which bandwidth is a scarce resource sought out by renegade rollergirls 
equipped with homemade lunchbox chiputers, the other by enabling people 
to gain complete control over a public access wireless network and 
create localised and temporary user groups.

Locative Media
The Locative Media Lab road test some locative tools, hot on the heels 
of a ground breaking session at ETCON and part of a series of events 
and workshops during 2004. (area)code is a themed locative project that 
enables passers by to leave their own digital graffiti through simple 
SMS, InterUrban offers an interactive narrative in the city streets, 
and Aura explores how a soundscape is composed by the relative movement 
of participants.

Sonic City
Streetscape by Iori Nakai is an interface that enables the user to 
trace a journey in sound through the city, Sonic Interface by Akitsugu 
Maebayashi alters the way the city is perceived by processing sounds 
heard as you wonder through the urban environment, and The Central City 
by stanza offers the chance to remix the city.

Location Based Sound
Colin Fallows curates live sound and sound installations that explore 
place and location, featuring Lee Ranaldo, John J. Campbell, Max 
Eastley, Colin Fallows , Russell Mills and Ian Walton, Mathew Gregory, 
Vergil Sharkya‚, Phil Mouldycliff and Colin Potter, and Glide by Echo 
and the Bunnymen‚s Will Sergeant.