Progress report 2

The Mobile Audience
Art and New Located Technologies of the Screen

Author/Editor: Martin Rieser


Summary

A critical study examining emergent uses of mobile, wearable and wire free technologies, which move the audience for screen-based work out of the gallery and cinema into public spaces and geographies, with a particular focus on forms of experimental art works using narrative in its new spatialised "locative" incarnations. This continues arguments on reception rehearsed in Rieser, M, Zapp, A , New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/ Narrative ( BFI , London, 2002), but examines and contextualises more recent and developing work founded on mobile technologies

This is a book involving primary field research, the principal aims being to develop visual languages and critical discourses around new art and narrative forms using mobile technologies, in particular through examining audience response.

Context

Screen cultures to date have been dominated both by narrative and by its modes of framing. Dispersed modes of interaction raise a series of research questions about new media art, particularly in relation to an audience’s modes of participation and reception. The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing methods (ubicom) are creating a world where information rich environments are mapped directly onto urban topologies. This opens up a series of interrogations around changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines from art and architecture to cultural studies.

In an industry context, proliferating technology and software for new media are providing opportunities for interactive relations between user and subject / object. In the field of 'interactive art', these characteristically centre on options for moving between one field and another e.g. event and archive data retrieval. The experimental work of this nature, which has so far been undertaken in the arena of interactive public art or in spatialised interaction through mobile technologies, is in pressing need of exploration, definition and documentation for the benefit of a wider audience.

Many current developments in ubiquitous computing are being explored in parallel by organisations in Britain and Europe such as the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University and the Mobile Bristol Project at Bristol University. This project intends to engage with industry futures at the leading edge of technology and aesthetics, where environments of production and reception currently lack definition, through both artistic practice and the documentation and analysis of allied works in the field.

Contributors and /or interviewees will include:

Dunne and Raby
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (IAMAS/Linz)
Anne Galloway (Carlton University)
Errki Huhtamo (UCLA)
Mirjam Struppek (Interactionfield)
Dr Susanne Jaschko (Transmediale)
Jennifer Laughlin (Amodal)
Debbi Lander (Future Physical )
Heidi Tikka (Finland)
John Dovey (Bristol University)
Matt Adams (Blast Theory)
Annie Lovejoy (Bristol)
Dr Steve Benford (Mixed Reality lab Nottingham)
Cati Vaucelle (MIT )
Margot Jacobs (Interactive Institute Gotenberg)
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (Trinity College/MIT)
Tim Redfern (Dublin)
William Wesley-Davies(NODE)
Katherine Moriwaki (Trinity College)
Peter Higgins(Land Design)
Andrew Chetty (Plan/The Public, West Bromwich)
Drew Hemment (FutureSonic)
Giles Lane (Urban Tapestries/Proboscis)
Stanza (Clark's Bursary/Soundtoys)
Andrew Patterson (UIAH)
Timo Arnall (Elastic Space)
Dr Beryl Graham (Crumb)
Teri Rueb ( Rhode Island School of Design)
Marc Tuters (Canada)
Duncan Speakman (Mobile Bristol)
Dr Constance Fleuriot (Mobile Bristol)
Dr Jo Reid ( Mobile Bristol )
Valentina Nisi (MIT Europe)
Tina Gonzales (Clutch)
Joey Berzowska,(Concordia)
Anthony Rowe (Squid Soup/Clark's Bursary)
Arianna Bossoli (MIT/LSE)
Duncan Speakman (Mobile Bristol)
Erik Geelhoed ( Mobile Bristol)
Trisha Austin (Central St Martin's)
Sharon Baurley (Central St Martin's)
Andrea Zapp (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Paul Sermon (University of Salford)
Roaring Girl Productions (Bristol)

Some of these interviews and articles will integrate several case studies in a single critical description/evaluation or will become more extended histories or critical discourses.