RE: forwarded from Lucas Bambozzi: Re: [-empyre-] mobile media

"Sally Jane Norman" <S.J.Norman@newcastle.ac.uk> · Sat, 16 Sep 2006 18:51:24 +0100

this is really provocative

thanks for relaying your misgivings Lucas about the stories we spin about these technologies. Personally I'm grateful for up-front analyses like this of devices and affordances that we so often end up hard-selling in spite of ourselves - if only just to keep research avenues open. But it's a sometimes quietly vicious situation. Yours and Armin's lucidity are appreciated.

I've been wondering about this layering of temporal and spatial qualities and experience, these mixes of public and private that we're all (rightly) so obsessively curious about, and trying to recontextualise stuff read ages ago by a Belgian literary scholar called Georges Poulet called L'etude du temps humain (my nomadism is such that my books are shored up in two countries, two languages, and never the right one on hand so this is an impro). In his introduction to this opus that dates back about fifty years, Poulet talks about the ubiquity of what he calls "angelic time" for mediaeval people - i.e. everyday time that was deeply permeated and overlayed by religious sensibility through the structuring of the day's activities from matins to vespers rung out by the church bells. From memory, Poulet describes - but I'll obviously have to track down the book - the strange and complex layering of time that ensues from this kind of process and invests our ways of thinking and doing. Plough the field, swing your scythe, feed your kids, but god's "angelic" time somehow chimes in regularly to let you know it's there as a permanent temporal envelope. Juxtaposition of the here and now and the eternal divine. The muezzin of course plays a similar role structuring everyday activities round the five daily prayers. 

Might the layering of time and intermingling/ intercontamination of public and private experience that e.g. mobile phones provide be seen as a secular response to archaic need and/ or capacity to draw together the immediate and the distant, the banally manipulable - we're just clever chimpanzees after all - and the symbolically other, i.e. capacity for projection that supposedly got us beyond being chimpanzees?  Did religion provide us with a kind of mental gymnastic ability to manipulate temporal and spatial experience that we can't afford to give up, as a symbol-hungry species, despite having toppled the gods that triggered these creative insights way back when? Has Nokia presciently cashed in on what might appear to be a stunningly obvious symbolic market niche for social scientists a hundred years from now? 

What dreadfully long words! Maybe you can see what I mean. One from the heart on sleeve/ cuff.

best

sjn

ps - I like bananas too

________________________________

From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Jim Andrews
Sent: Sat 16/09/2006 6:04 PM
To: Soft_Skinned_Space
Subject: forwarded from Lucas Bambozzi: Re: [-empyre-] mobile media

Forwarded from Lucas Bambozzi: Re: [-empyre-] mobile media

-----Original Message-----
From: Lucas Bambozzi [mailto:lbambozzi@comum.com]
Sent: September 16, 2006 9:01 AM
To: soft_skinned_space; soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] mobile media

one question about:

At 16:50 +0100 13/9/06, marc wrote:

Our mobile media may be a potential medium of re-distributing our selves as
monetary products, just by using it...

another question about:

At 10:04 +0100 12/9/06, Luis Silva wrote:
 are these two public spaces ontologically different, despite overlaping? Is
this mobile media space truely a public space, or a new version of the
concept of private sphere, but once again with no physical references?

Tonight was the opening of the third exhibition I curated [in three years],
dealing with mobile media. Once again it was sponsored by a major mobile
phone brand.

In my deepest honesty, sometimes I had the feeling that I was lying to
myself when I was talking to the audience about the expressive qualities of
this 'new medium'. In this and previous exhibitions, mobile technologies
were used by artists in different ways: as a vehicle for short video pieces,
as a dispositif for access to remote data (via Bluetooth), as a locative
'surveilled' device, as an interface bridging distant public and private
spheres.

I usually talk about the need to face the small screens (they will be kept
small for ages), about new possibilities of using micro media, about
desirable networks to come, about a new concept of private sphere. I tend to
say that going public might be good.

Such feeling leads me to think about how we get trapped by wireless utopias,
as pointed by Armin Medosch in his 'Not Just Another Wireless Utopia -
developing the social protocols of free networking'.
.
Mobile phones, wireless gadgets, online games, GPS, connected enabled PDA's
and handhelds bring together the common aspiration to interface 'realities',
not necessarily promoting any true participation or closer touch regarding
the 'outside' space, in the sense pointed by Bauman in City of Fears, City
of Hopes (2003). They attempt to introduce the notion that reaching distant
and separated 'realities' - often in-between private spheres - is the same
of sharing experiences in public domains.

In our current and euphemistically 'globalized' condition, no big city can
escape from being immersed in the recent mediation tools provided by
communication corporations. Slogans such as 'Live Without Borders' (Tim
Brasil), 'Connecting People' (Nokia), 'Solutions for a Small World' (IBM),
bear promises of providing the feeling of participation in the 'outside'
space. Far more than just selling communication tools, these slogans suggest
the access to new worlds, the immersion into new 'realities', which
inadvertently, come with representational artifices based on stereotypes and
essentialisms that flattens and commodifies the actuality of whatever
'reality' it is being depicted.

In São Paulo, a significant number of its inhabitants live in sealed
environments, protecting themselves from public spaces, street-level
activities, or, a term commonly used in Portuguese, 'raw realities'.
Networking activities are seen to be a solution for working and living in
such a time consuming space as well as a model for sharing experiences in a
supposedly protected public space - in comparison to the real city.

Mobile technology based environments, as well as our current representations
of intimacy and privacy constitute today a sort of fabricated realities,
which have been reshaped as mere discourses: they have been commodified by
the market as aesthetic values attached to technological products, and
locked into a logic of technological interface as the only possible way for
proximity and real time communication.

So the questions are: is it a typically cultural syndrome? - related to
cities such as São Paulo, Lima, Johanesburg? how much is it a typically
reactionary position to consider that  real life experiences must include
'physical references'?

Just wondering after a rushy and packed night opening.

Best

L

wishing you well.

marc

Luis and everyone else,

Thanks for inviting me Paula to be part of this months list.

I think Luis' comments are a really good starting point. They also happen to
be directly related to some work I did recently called Mobile Dream Telling,
was part of the Sydney Design Festival.
(http://mobiledreamtelling.blogspot.com/)

What might be useful to discuss is whether the concept of 'space' is
relevant to the notion of mobility. Perhaps what we are dealing with is
different ways of being within time. Are mobile phones changing how we are
to ourselves and to others? Do they influence our sense of self? Is the
mobility that is at the heart of the mobile phone creating mobile, mulitple
'egos' or 'selves'?   Who or what is the remote 'other'?

Theorist Sadie Plant believes that mobile phones have created a new form of
functioning of peoples minds which she refers to as bi-psyche. This double
psyche is required to attend simultaneously to the real world that
physically surrounds the speaker and the virtual world that is opened up
through the phone he or she is holding. She raises questions around the
effects of what can be seen as a schizophrenic existence or bi-psyche, that
is a divorce between what one says verbally and what one does with one's
body.

Following on, Jose Luis Pinillos has coined the phrase The Present Extensive
as a way of living in time that emerges as linked to the modern city or
urban psychopathology. 'Swith its incessant mobility and rapidity of its
changes, the city situates its inhabitants in a permanent here and now,
where references to yesterday and tomorrow vanish. Precisely because of this
provisional character that prevails and because urban existence accentuates
the ephemeral nature of all events, the technified city produces in those
who live there a form of living in time that has been called the 'present
extensive' (Pinillos 1977:239)

So what does this mean in terms of the self? If mobile phones allow us to
manage multiple identities simultaneously what does that mean for our
relationships? Can we collate these identities to create an enduring or
permanent sense of self that I think, is necessary to live and make sense of
ones life?  If mobile phones connect us to particular, remote others, do
they close us off consequently from the spontaneous, unexpected contact with
strangers that can be so important in opening our experiences and minds to
our fellow human beings?

These are purposefully philosophical questions since my own interest in
mobile media is not about the technology but about the sociological and
psychological effects, affects, consequences, influences and creative
product that can be derived from these fascinating little machines.

> From: Luis Silva <silva.luis@netcabo.pt>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] mobile media
> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:04:51 +0100
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am very happy to be able to be part of this month's discussion.  Having
studied Social Sciences and personally interested in how they  can share
some insights over our relation to technology, Mobile Media  is such an
interesting subject to be discussing. Mobile media changed  the way we
interact with technology, with physical (i won't be using  the term real)
space and with each other. The term here is ubiquity,  no longer nomadism.
These devices have been shaping a new kind of  public space that is no
longer the utopian cyberspace of the  ninetees, but a new one that still
relates to a certain extent to  Habermas's definition and has , by means of
its own mobility, a  strong relation to the physical space in which we lead
our daily  routines. It is public, but is is also private, it is dependent
of  the physical environment but only to deny its specificity and  minimize
the importance of local references and context.
>
> A good example of this new kind of public space, not dependent on the
geography but on connections, that can also serve as a good starting  point
to this debate is the project "As if we were alone" by the  artistic duo
Empfangshalle. This project adresses the mobile phone  user and how he or
she creates mobile "private spheres" while  communicating over the phone.
They have concluded that "whoever uses  his cell phone in public dissociates
himself from his surroundings  via real or virtual spaces". The core of the
project lies in this  process of dissociating oneself from the physical
space through  mobile media. One departs from the geographically defined
public  space of the streets, the squares, or public transportation to join
a  (semi) public space defined by the amount and variety of connections.
>
> So my point here is, are these two public spaces ontologically  different,
despite overlaping? Is this mobile media space truely a  public space, or a
new version of the concept of private sphere, but  once again with no
physical references?
>
> Best,
> Luis
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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