Thoughts @

something about mobile art

We haven’t seen a lot of “mobile art” on our cell phones yet compared to the explosive wave of artistic expression we have known during the early days of the Internet. In this post I would like to explore a bit why we haven’t seen such an explosion yet on our mobiles with attention to some new initiatives and possible opportunities in this area.

Artistic expression is important for technology since (digital) artists explore the boundaries between design and technology and have a strong influence on emerging visual trends. Technicians rarely are good designers and good designers often don’t have enough in-depth technical knowledge, this is nothing new for people in our industry. It might look sad however to notice that after 10 years of internet publishing this situation barely has changed… People who master good skills, both designwise and technical, have great employment opportunities ahead, that’s for sure.

Mobile culture emerges in urban areas. Rap and hip-hop culture, once a subculture too, now extremely popular in the US (and other parts of the world) and this reflects on the ringtones sales of this year. Artists like Public Enemy have been going mobile, not only selling rintones of their music but linking street rap culture elements to different kinds of mobile content.

I believe mobile art is a very efficient and fun way for new artists to spread their work (and make some extra money!). As Public Enemy was once undergound, the French grafitti artist Miss Van has moved from the street walls to the gallery walls. From street to popular, it takes time, talent and skills to get there. But what these artists have in common is they all have their own communication code and tools. It looks obvious to me that mobile art and its culturally linked forms of expression will use the mobile as a new form for subcultural promotion as flyers have done for so many different subculture groups before. And brands will have to communicate with these groups soon, using the tools and the code these youngsters use.

In Japan we have witnessed the impact of i-mode content on youth culture. In Europe however, art on the mobile has never really taken off. Due to mobile phones not capable of displaying graphics? Because people don’t/didn’t have/use the 3G phones yet? Mismatching targeting different cultural groups? Too restricted law on privacy? Probably a combination of…

Can integrating new ways of ‘street culture’ elements into mobile use create a new dimension for todays mobile culture on a global level?

For some years now, we have known the truly pioneering work of Yakuta in Finland (being re-designed now). Nokia has its own Connect to Art free of charge mobile (only) exhibitions including work from a.o. Louise Bourgeois and Nam June Paik …

In the US there is now Start Mobile. Their aim is to bring great urban art to your mobile phone’s background screen. Start Mobile was created by the San Francisco art gallery Start SOMA and features downloadable wallpapers ($1.99 each) from over 100 urban artists. I encourage the idea. Their mobile wallpapers collection includes a.o. work from:

Yumiko Kayukawa Yumiko Kayukawa | Japan Tes One Tes One | USA

Lynne Naylor Lynne Naylor | USA Tado Tado | UK

Now this service just needs to become globally accessible…

Start Mobile just enabled the independent film Quality Of Life to promote their film via mobile art marketing.

QUALITY OF LIFE is a narrative feature film that sheds light on a clandestine graffiti subculture, highlighting one artist’s personal struggle for identity, acceptance, and recognition. The film was shot and edited in the Mission District of San Francisco with the support of many in the area’s renowned graffiti subculture. The raw, low-budget movie opened in 2005 with sold-out film festival screenings in Stockholm, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Spain, and Berlin, where it won a coveted jury award at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival.

What brought me to the attention writing this post was the press release where Quality Of Life producer Brant Smith echoes these sentiments:

“… Our audience doesn’t care about print and TV ads. They’re on-line and on their mobiles. We need to reach them where they are and do it in the most cost-effective way possible. Our audience appreciates ingenuity in marketing. They know we don’t have any money. And most are down to support us in any way possible and help us get the word out about the film.”

Todays mobile phones are capable of browsing specifically mobile designed web pages, new and different ways of mobile communication and expression has to be learned and needs to be understand. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his just released Get Back in the Box:

“… we must instead learn to see people not as individuals looking for power or social status, but as parts of a group looking for cohesion.”

The mobile phone is gonna have an important role in the search for cohesion the coming years…

Posted on December 27th, 2005 in Thoughts
Tagged as No Tags
Written by Rudy De Waele

4 Responses to “something about mobile art”

Comments

  1. ncio says:
    December 27th, 2005

    I predict the year of 2006 will be the breakthrough for cell phone themes. The traditional wallpapers will be history by the end of next year in the same way as mono ringtones are today.

  2. andrew b says:
    December 27th, 2005

    mobile phones are being used widely by grafitti artists in europe . from barcelona 2 berlin . they record their flaming and tagging with their mobile phone filming capabilities and distribute via mobile bluetooth to an eager audience . indeed the big brands need to recognise self artistic expression amongst the youth via their mobile multimedia device and tap into it . if they are to recover the youth’s desensitized perception of traditional above the line advertising . french rap artists such as mc solar are using mobile music to stimulate the disenchanted minority youth of france . where the french urban youth are using sms as a new form of pop culture . a new form of urban cultural expressionism in digital format . digital tags! cultural tags! using pictures . graphics. and movies. to express themselves . art as we know it the physical sense is changing and with it the parameters of how youth express themselves.

  3. Pascal says:
    December 27th, 2005

    In the same vein as the connect to art mobile exhibition organised by Nokia; ArtDublin developed a small mobile site (m.artdublin.ie) to promote 13 Irish artists for the inaugural ArtDublin 06 exhibition. It proved a great success to distribute links in text messages and engage a wider audience.

  4. Brian Jackson says:
    December 27th, 2005

    I’m an abstract painter, with what you might call a low technology threshhold. I’ve seen far too many ‘physical’ artists become low-grade technology obsessives. I use mobile photo’ technology to record my art-works; both in transition and final product. I use it as a guide of thumb. If a painting works on a small screen then I know I’m getting somewhere. Love the art but use the technology wisely.

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