Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.

Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

Singapore.
The day five session at ISEA 2008 continues with Greg Giannis. He presents his work through a mapping interface he's been working on for some time; the aim here is to engage in subjective mapping - which maps media objects (texts, images, sound, video) captured live while moving in the physical work onto a map operated through an experimental Website. Display on the Website uses what Greg calls semantic zooming - more information from captured objects is revealed as the user focusses on them by zooming in.

Such mapping aims to investigate our sense of place, and there is currently something of a crisis in the cartographic community, Greg suggests, driven by changes in approaches to mapping; the community is looking towards artists to help them develop new approaches to cartography, and this is similar perhaps to the crisis in art as it emerged with the advent of photography. What's especially interesting here is the possibility of collective mapping (which can also serve as a form of collective resistance against the increasingly engineered sense of individual subjectivity).

Singapore.
We had the closing ceremony last night already, but there's still a final day of ISEA 2008 papers to go. The morning session this Wednesday starts with Tristan Thielmann, presenting on geomedia as a potential Web 3.0. He describes this as a shift towards WWWW (who, what, when, where), and points to Google's shift towards a more strongly map-based service (which on Google Maps itself combines photos and Wikipedia content with map information, for example). Flickr, too, has announced that it will georeference all its content in the future.

Singapore.
The session here at ISEA 2008 continues with Drew Hemment, who reflects on his experience running the Futuresonic locative media festival in the UK. Of particular interest here is the contradiction between the excitement of locative media practitioners and the concerns around privacy which such media forms also highlight. Our locative devices trace our movements.

What art forms are intrinsic or unique to locative media, then? This was explored through the 2004 Mobile Connections exhibition. Such locative art can be understood to be the art of mobile and wireless systems, and it is possible to develop a taxonomy of locative media art works (works which are realist, figurative, or social on the one hand, and/or engage in mapping, ambulation, or geoannotation on the other). Many locative media works continue to show little or no engagement with lived spaces and social contexts, however.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on this fourth day of ISEA 2008 starts with Daniel Sauter. He begins by noting the interdependent relationship between architects, artists and designers which has emerged in recent years - a media architecture or mediatecture driven by a number of significant practitioners. Daniel's focus here is especially on the model of site-specificity in this context.

New York's Times Square or Tokyo's Shibuya are important sites for such work, but there are also other venues which function differently and move beyond anthropomorphic dimensions. One such venue is the Victory Media Network in Dallas with several large movable video screens; another is Federation Square in Melbourne, which hosts the third Urban Screens Conference this year; Kunsthaus Graz is an art space which works in a similar space - a vaguely zeppelin-shaped building clothed in a skin of several hundred lightbulbs which can be manipulated. Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center has a digital facade, and something similar has been designed for the Beijing Olympics multifunction arena and the CCTV Broadcast Headquarters in the same city. Further, in Dubai the Dubai Pearl will be developed - a glowing pearl-shaped space suspended above Dubai.

Perth.
The second session on this last day of PerthDAC starts with a paper by Larissa Hjorth, who examines camera phone practices in Seoul and Melbourne (the paper is presented by Christy Dena, though). Mobile media is positioned here as a prosumer machine through which we experience media and art in everyday life; mobile phones have become an integral part of everyday life- no longer a symbol of business or a class status symbol, they are now part of almost all social practices, and their uses have grown well beyond voice telephony and SMSing. Mobile phones remain connected to locality in a process of mobility and mobilism; they inform and locate co-present communication. Forms of mobile media are ongoing personal ethnographies, and are frequently banal and implicated in the politics of banality, which requires further analysis.

Sydney.
I chaired another session in the morning, and so I couldn't blog it... The first post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with a paper by Marsha Berry, whose interest is in cartographies of mobile mediascapes; mobile places are places in between, threshold places, sites of reception and production which are characterised by the interrelationship between imagination and bodily experiences. In these spaces we find ritual gestures (such as the use of SMS as quasi-postcards) and the performance of the self; they raise perennial questions of embodiment and consciousness of our own experiences. Additionally, we are also surrounded constantly by surveillance in such spaces, as well as enacting a form of sousveillance through our own cameraphones and mediamaking. Telepresence is ubiquitous.

Sydney.
The final day of Mobile Media 2007 has started, and the opening keynote today is by Misa Matsuda (the other scheduled keynote speaker, Shin Dong Kim, unfortunately couldn't make it here). Parent-child relationships are now mediated by mobile technologies, and this provides and insight to the complex relationship between technologies and society overall. Japan is at the forefront of this, as it has the highest up-take of mobile Internet access, which may be seen as foreshadowing the future for mobile technology overall. This began with DoCoMo's introduction of i-mode phones, and is enhanced now also by GPS, data transmission, and music download capabilities, for example. Japanese society's transformation may therefore be indicative of future global changes, too.

Sydney.
The second keynote this evening at Mobile Media 2007 is by Leslie Haddon, who shifts our focus to children's uses of mobile technologies. His research focussed on 11-16-year-olds, and looked at as well as beyond their communicatory practices - including also uses of mobiles as cameras, music players, content transfer devices, games consoles, Internet and television platforms. Some of the teens involved in this study obtained their first mobiles at age 8-10, and many had already owned more than one phone in their lives (often traded down from parents and siblings). Gradually, they had acquired more and more functionality, and they therefore have an understanding of the history of fashionable phone features and uses over the past years; upgrades were motivated in part by fashion, but also by the wearing out of existing phones.