Re: [-empyre-] RE: Mobile Media debate

[G.H.Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net>]

On Sep 23, 2006, at 12:22 AM, Lucas Bambozzi wrote:

> *Cool stuff you don't know you need yet*
> SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts, is designed to be worn 
> around the neck

gh comments:

I always have problems with new media discussions that center around 
tool functions. The Microsoft technologist talks about a "visual 
diary." There are diaries and then there are diaries. The diary of Anne 
Frank is a just a diary if you reduce it to a tool function.  120 Days 
of Sodom by the Marquise de Sade is just a diary if you reduce it to 
its' form.  I don't even agree with the form follows function rule.  
Communication tools are used to communicate. That's the how. What is 
communicated and what it means is entirely something else.

In New York when the towers were falling everyone was trying to 
telephone each other. The first thing that went down were the cell 
phones. They were overtaxed. The land lines went dead in my 
neighborhood (I'm eight blocks north of the WTC). The only people able 
to communicate for the next couple of days were people with 
blackberry's. In the corporate world after 9/11 many companies switched 
to blackberry's. That was their response. Business must continue.

If you look at the iPod it is a collection device. What it does is 
allow you to engage in an obsessive aesthetic activity. You carry your 
collection with you and savor it. I believe any device created within a 
capitalist commodity culture functions to create a consumer or to 
enhance the experience of consumption.  Other functions of 
communication devices are corporate extension of work hours so that a 
person is on call all the time. The only leisure obtained is in the 
function of a consumer.

What then does an artist do with these parameters? One is to subvert 
the corporate structure to co-opt the devices and re-program them. 
Another is to use them for activities that are totally un-intended. A 
simple example is using a consumer video camera as a political tool. 
Hook up that video to the internet and you have a device to distribute 
information as a mass medium. Make it into a podcast and it is a mobile 
delivery. encode as a 3gpp video and you can distribute as cellphone 
propaganda.

My own project RANTAPOD <http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod> looks at 
this mobile medium to make art. I create a series of performance/ 
meditations in front of a video camera. I then turn them into podcasts. 
Part of what I play with is the obsession of a collector. That is 
obtaining the full collection and/or anticipating the next video. 
Within this extended performance there is a structure of continuity and 
revelation. Indeed, If one collects all the rant videos onto a video 
iPod and then randomizes them with the shuffle function, different 
meanings emerge from the narrative. The tool reveals a different level 
of meaning however the meaning was always there, the tool did not 
create the meaning.  Let me say that again, THE TOOL DID NOT CREATE THE 
MEANING.