[-empyre-] mobile deja vu and questions re form

[Brett Stalbaum <stalbaum@ucsd.edu>]

I just want to make a quick observation about my deja vu. Luis Silva 
raised an important point earlier, yet it slipped away. We seem to be 
having an ageless conversation here. I have been around this 
conversation before, not only re chat rooms, but re the internet in 
nineties. (Take for example Jordan Crandall's Interaction: Artistic 
Practice in the Network.) The debates re public access television were 
before my time, but I seem to recall it consisting of many of the same 
kinds of argument's regarding the social, access and power, surveillance 
and identity. (And of course, for the art world derivation of the 
conversation, a cystic mass of artists projects that range from 
Pedagogical Cassandraism to useful tactical interventions...)

Simon Taylor touched on some of the social issues that face us when he 
wrote of increased speed of transfer toward frictionless and the 
dissolution of physical barriers to the mediation of the capitalist 
subject, by now a subject in space. (Simon, I hope I accurately 
characterize your earlier post.) As Marina Vishmidt points out, we could 
also be talking about all of this on the excellent iDC list right now. 
All true. We do and we have, and that is my deja vu.

Then Lucas Barnbozzi points us to Microsoft, who seem at a glance to be 
*doing* experiments with the formal possibilities of the medium, albeit, 
not doubt, with a mind toward further mastery over the capitalist 
subject. So, I'd like to pose some questions for this month's respondents:

How many artists will engage with the formal possibilities of the 
emerging locative medium as the distribution of database, computation, 
network, and small computing devices projected into space?

Versus how many artists will produce yet more pedagogical interrogations 
of the anticipated or emerging consequences of mobile surveillance upon 
identity and the social?

I don't think that these trajectories are mutually exclusive or in any 
way contradictory of each other, btw. (Although I am trying to imply 
unless we develop our own emerging configurations of practice qua the 
mobile computational medium, we can *only* use or repurpose established 
configurations in order to complain about it all... whereas I think 
there are formal issues for artists to explore - Simon's indexing of 
speed for example... again I am in no way arguing for a purely 
"formalist" locative media.)

Nevertheless, my final question is, what do you see as the formal (sans 
political) questions inherent in or implied by mobile media?

--
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084
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