[…] To begin the present discussion, I re-purpose the term “telepathic communication” as a rhetorical tool. By telepathic communication I mean the current and future set of personal mobile communications devices, services and infrastructure – from simple mobile phones to immersive, shared augmented reality.7 As one of the leading legitimate scientific investigators of psychic phenomena described it:

We venture to introduce the words Telesthesia and Telepathy to cover all cases of impression received at a distance without the normal operation of the recognised sense organs. These general terms may, we think, be found of permanent service.

“Of permanent service”, indeed. The adoption of this term is intended to focus our attention on the cognitive and sensory nature of mobile communications over the purely functional, social aspects. That is, by employing this term, I seek to emphasize the nature of mobile communications as an extension of the self, rather than exclusively a media for social communication…” — Thinking in Telepathic Cities [PDF] by Anthony Townsend.

Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and! systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions ? or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

The Centre for Research in Art, Education and Media (CREAM) invites you to presentations and discussions of new work using mobile phones by Mark Amerika, Chris Fry and Max Schleser.

Mark Amerika will be showing his new work which composites various art personas and artworks into a narrative sequence of mobile phone video images that conjure up both the spirits of the past as well as hauntological actors of the present.

Chris Fry will be showing and talking about his research into how mobile and pervasive artworks offer the potential to transcend the traditional boundaries of time and place, allowing for highly personalized experiences. He will refer to his recent artworks Nomadic Guru and Magic Ray.

Max Schleser will be showing excerpts and discussing his work on mobile-mentary a film that captures Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone and will discuss his research into the impact of mobile phones on the transforming mediascape.

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, “Survival,” with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book “Survival”, the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to “write” the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth…). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my “survival” here.

The word “SURVIVAL” has been changed to “SUR-VIV-ALL,” trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred “SUR VIV (R) E / VIE …”, something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, “VIVA”, claiming to live, an imperative. In English “survival”, has its original meaning, plus the “ALL” that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The “Waypoints” on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we’ve accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMl7_HiuKo

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

The group exhibition No Place - like Home: Perspectives on Migration in Europe features eighteen Belgian and international artists. Their videos, photographic works and installations take a closer look at what lies under the surface of the migration issue. Migration is a thing of all ages. Where Europeans once colonized various continents and emigrated en masse to other lands both in and beyond their own continent, movement from the opposite direction has now taken hold. Capital, goods and information circulate freely in the late-capitalist, globalized world economy. For people, however, mobility is arranged somewhat differently. Borders and territories are still the primary expression of national sovereignty, however multi ethnic populations may have become. For Europe – which permanently shifts between regulating, even attracting, and then repelling strangers – these are the outer borders, the so called Schengenland regions. No Place - like Home (mark the hyphen) investigates how inner and outer space, how ‘we’ and ‘they’ maintain complex relations with one another and the frictions this generates. The media, like tourism – a phenomenon that on the Italian island of Lampedusa vacillates with the refugee issue – have little to do with transparency. By way of the varying perceptions of 18 artists whose work focuses on the illegal refugees who are today’s modern nomads, this exhibition hopes to help visualize an issue that cannot be summarized in black-and-white contrasts: an interwoven, variegated tale of migration networks and refugee trafficking, cartography and geographical military data, migration management and border infiltrations, international rights, lack of rights and lawlessness.

Today, illegal migration into Europe comes primarily from southeastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa. One exceptional focal point of the exhibition is the sanitary cordon being placed around that last continent. Peripheral locations such as the Strait of Gibraltar and a number of Sicilian islands, almost perpetually besieged by refugees, connect several contributions to the exhibition. Miguel Abad and Herman Asselberghs are showing images of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, where Europe is establishing part of its migration policy outside its own borders. Pieter Geenen, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Lorio, Federico Baronello and Takuji Kogo indicate how, on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the reality of tourism runs hand in hand with that of asylum seekers, being repatriated or otherwise, without the two worlds ever touching. In her comprehensive installation, Sahara Chronicle, Ursula Biemann highlights the sub-Saharan exodus to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Schengen, the Castle by Xavier Arenós, charts how things move on from there. His work is not only a typology of the streams of mobility to Spain, but also reveals the underlying macro-economic space. Cartography is also found in the contributions of the Migreurop network and the magazine collective, An Architektur: on the one hand a map of all possible transit, relief or detention camps connected with European territory, and on the other hand as a specific analysis in the form of an architectural dissection of Polish refugee centres.

The fact that European political space is not consistent with European immigration is a subtext in the work of Erzen Shkololli, Yves Mettler, Herman Asselberghs and Thomas Locher, as is the question of what common value systems still mean on this continent from a cultural, historical perspective, once stereotypes are set aside. The paradox of an interior European space that defends its borders versus a world where nothing stops at national frontiers any more is evidenced in the photographic work of Armin Linke. His work draws attention to the most diverse effects of globalisation and serves as a kind of resonance chamber for the exhibition, as does an ironic installation by Pravdoliub Ivanov with some thirty different cooking surfaces and pots. What remains is the individual voice of the migrant, which is generally kept out of the media. Its tone is allegorical for Hans Op de Beeck, a naked testimony in the work of Ursula Biemann and in the participatory documentary, Pour vivre j’ai laisé. In this last project, initiated and directed by Bénédicte Liénard, asylum seekers at the Petit Chateau refugee centre in Brussels take the camera into their own hands in an introspective document that does not lack humor and is made from a non-voluntary, and therefore powerful perspective, in a plea for a world as a place that can still be created by mankind.

Thinking about migration means making a close examination of oneself. With No Place - like Home, Argos lays claim to a trans-national political space. What public space, what identity stands counter to this? What and where is ‘home’? These are questions that will be further investigated in a parallel programme of lectures and video presentations.

Curated by Paul Willemsen with contributions by Miguel Abad, An Architektur, Xavier Arenós, Herman Asselberghs, Federico Baronnello, Ursula Biemann, Raphaël Cuomo, Maria Iorio, Provdoliub Ivanov, Pieter Geenen, Takuji Kogo, Bénédicte Liénard, Armin Linke, Thomas Locher, Yves Mettler, Migreurope, Hans Op de Beeck, Erzen Shkololli.

MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). The participants invited to contribute to the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional /affective senses and dream states, embodiment and communication.

CAMILLE BAKER is a Ph.D. Candidate at SMARTlan, University of East London, conducting research on Networked Performance Media, funded by BBC R+D.

Making DICOM Dance: Marilene Oliver’s practice-based research looks at medical and laser imaging technologies that scan bodies and break them down to bytes. Oliver examines from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to convert flesh to pixel (digital photography), flesh to voxel (MRI, CT and PET) and flesh to xyz co-ordinates (3D laser scanning). Oliver will present a selection of artworks made using MRI data (where the subject of the scans is bespoke) and CT data (where the subject of the scans are either infamous or anonymous). The presentation will be both technical and theoretical, concentrating on the performative puppeteering activity that emerges when working with MRI and CT data.

MARILENE OLIVER is currently a research student in the Fine Art Print department at the Royal College of Art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy, Royal Institution, Science Museum (UK). Oliver was awarded the Royal Academy print prize in 2006 and the Printmaking Today prize in 2001.

How can mobile technology contribute to democracy, culture, art, ecology, peace, education, health and third-sector?

KEYWORDS: 3g, activism, art, augmented reality, bluetooth, citizen videos, culture, cyberculture, democracy, diy, ecology, education, electronic art, electronic music, gprs, gps, health, innovation, interactive and networked performance with mobile and wireless devices, interactive architecture, lbs, live cinema, locative, mesh networks, mms, mobile activism, mobile and wireless games, mobile applications, mobile education, mobile music, mobile narrative, mobile streaming, open networks, peace, rfid, sensors, sms, third-sector, trends, video production and distribution, wearable technologies, wi-fi, wi-max, zigbee, etc.

Mobilefest is an event that aims to question and discuss the advent of the new mobile technologies in their relationships with the various segments of society, being the first International Festival of the kind.

The main objective is to provide a multifaceted and heterogenic environment of discussions, actions and creations that seek intelligent and innovative solutions, through the virtualities of the new mobile technologies, to solve or even discuss the issues that trouble contemporary societies.

The effort of the event in regards to the new communication technologies is based on the perception of its potential growth - there are more than 3 billion active mobiles nowadays. The increase of its use is not only for communication between people, but also for activities of education, social inclusion, varied artistic productions, entertainment, security, content production and distribution, socialization networks, activism actions, health, commerce, advertising, etc.

HISTORY:

The I Mobilefest was launched in November 2006, with an international seminar that took place in São Paulo, at Sesc Paulista, with live and free transmission via the Internet. In its first edition, it broached the social, cultural and aesthetic implications that the mobile ands mobile technologies have been promoting in global scale The festival discussed the main outlining of the relationships between mobile technologies (like mobile, handhelds, etc.) and the many segments of the society listed above. Besides the discussion, the event is made of technical and cultural activities and also includes an expositive exhibition and the launch of a recognition award of the best mobile works in the following catgories: SMS Writing - Micro Stories and Poetry, Photojournalism, Video, Moblogs and Videologs , the I Mobilefest Awards.

The seminar gathered 14 foreign artists and researchers and 20 Brazilian artists and specialists. The II edition of Mobilefest (2007) gathered together artists, researchers and panelists from many countries and had considerable increase in the size of its programmation. It was 5 days of seminars, 2 days of bootcamp and 30 days of exhibition. The big innovation in 2007 was the realization of simultaneous events in England (University of Westmister), in The Netherlands, (The Waag Society) and in the United States (New York University - ITP). In the audiovisual section, Mobilefest consolidated the wish to creat a network of international festivals about mobile content production. Aside from Telemig Arte Mov (Brazil) and Mobifest (Canada), already present in the previous year, other festivals were shown, such as Movilfilm Fest (Spain), Pocket Shorts (England and Scotland), Pocket Films (France), Microfilmes (Portugal) and The 4th Screen (United States). The extensive Mobilefest schedule also includeded: videoconferences, meetings, seminars, Mobileactive at Mobilefest and the International Exhibition. In this year also, Mobilefest Festival became and oficial part of the calendar for the city of São Paulo.

OBJECTIVES:
* Popularise mobile technology as to contribute to social inclusion through the generalisation of knowledge, its use and possibilities of interaction promoted by these new communication media.

* Offer the audience the an award specialised in recognising works that use mobile technology.

* Promote cultural interchange among national and international researchers and producers of this area.

* Incentive the creative thought and production about the new technologies aiming to expand the possible hardware and software functions in the mobile technology sector.

* Stimulate the production of content in the mobile technology segment in Brazil in terms of production in the industrial segment as well as from the point of view of the independent creator, thus intending to seek for balanced ways of relationships between these two players which will not mean mutual negation.

* Enable the participation of all interested in producing and distributing content through the mobile communication networks.

CALL FOR POSTERS, PAPERS, PROJECTS & PRODUCTS

How can mobile technology contribute to democracy, culture, art, ecology, peace, education, health and third-sector?

DEADLINE
The deadline for posters, projects and papers is June 30th 2008.
Earlier email correspondence with the festival is more than welcome!

SUBMISSION
Submissions should be sent by June 30th 2008 via email to 2008(at)mobilefest.org including information bellow:

Complete name:
Organization / Company:
Short bio:
Age:
Summary / Abstract:
Includes a demonstration? YES/NO
A new tool or version is released during this event? YES/NO
Format: Conference / Workshop / Demonstration Internet connectivity needed? YES / NO
Country:
City:
Telephone number:
Mobile number:
University (optional):
University level (optional):
Proposed category (democracy, culture, art, ecology, peace, education, health, third-sector or “all together**)

** MOBILEFEST is a transdisciplinary event, the more interconnection, the better.

ATENTION:
- Abstracts must be 300 words minimum
- Papers must be 1000 words minimum
- The submitted paper must be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish or Italian
- Papers submitted are limited to 45 minutes presentation
- The paper must be attached to the email in .TXT, .RTF, .DOC or PDF files.
- Projects must have documentation: blueprint, photos, video and technical rider.
- Submit as many works as you want, one mail submission for each.
- Workshop / Demonstration - Format: 30 min to 2 hours demonstration / workshop

PARTICIPANTS IN THE PAST
Adriene Jenik, Alan Kay, Alberto Magno, Alberto Tognazzi, Alexandre Matias, Ami Dar, Amyris Fernandez, Andri Lemos, Andreas Blazoudakis, Bngela Bardin, Armin Medosch, Becky Faith, Brenda Burrell, Camille Baker, Carmen Maia, Carol Mafra, Cisar Jartorelli, Christian Wiener, Clsvis Borges, Cory Ramey, Cyrus Frisch, Daniel Arazjo, Daniel Florjncio, Daniel Oelsner Lopes, David Barnard, David Cavallo, Douglas Nadalini da Silva, Duncan Kennedy, Eduardo Bicudo, Eliezer Muniz, Eva Weber, Evgeny Morozov, Fabio Fon, Felipe Albuquerque Pereira, Fernando Teco Sodri, Gabe Sawhney, Geandre Tomazoni, Geert Lovink, Gilson Schwartz, Giselle Beiguelman, Graham Brown-Martin, Graziela Tanaka, Gustavo Mansur, Heather A. Horst, Hernani Dimantas, Howard Rheingold, Hyejin Choi, Irene Karaguilla Ficheman, Jackson Filho, Jane Placca, Jason Lewis, Javier Rodrigo, Jean-Nokl Montagni, Jinwoo Chung, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Juan Carlos Zuqiga Torres, Juca Varella, Karinna Bidermann, Kate Bauer, Kati Hartman, Kati London, Katrin Verclas, Liana Brazil, Lisa Roberts, Lucas Bambozzi, Lucas Longo, Lucie Bilanger, Marcelo Nunes de Carvalho, Marcelo Tas, Maroussia Livesque, Martin Owen, Maurmcio Hirata, Mauro Rubens, Max Leite, Max Schleser, Mieke Gerritzen, Mimi Ito, Norene Leddy, Oleksandr Demchenko, Otakar Svacina, Paulo Henrique Ferreira, Pedro Paranagua, Rachel Jacobs, Rachel Payne, Renato Cruz, Renato Rollemberg, Rob van Kranenburg, Robson Lisboa, Rogirio da Costa, Ronald Lenz, Ronaldo Simco da Costa, Rosana Herman, Roseli de Deus Lopes, Russ Rive, Shawn Van Every, Sheila Kinkade, Soraya Braz, Suely Rolnik, Tamaryn Nelson, Toni Eliasz, Victor Rebougas, Volker Grassmut, Wagner Martins, Zico Gses

FROM THE FOLLOWING COUNTRIES
Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, England, EUA, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Luxemburg, Peru, Portugal, Scotland, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Uruguay, Zimbabwe.

MOBILEFEST FESTIVALS NETWORK
MOBILEFEST has started in 2007 a network of mobile content festivals, if you are connected with a festival not listed bellow and wish to take part of this network, please contact us at 2008(at)mobilefest.org. Our partners
include:

- Mobifest | Canada
- Pocket Shorts | UK
- Pocket Films | France
- Arte Mov | Brazil
- Microfilmes de Lisboa | Portugal
- The 4th Screen | USA

NODES MOBILEFEST

MOBILEFEST has started in 2007 a network of Mobilefest Nodes in Universities, Media Centers and Researches Institutes around the world , if you want your institution to be connected with Mobilefest , please contact us at 2008(at)mobilefest.org

Our partners include:
- Waag society | The Netherlands, Amsterdam
- Westminster University | UK, London
- New York University - ITP | USA, New York

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication. [posted by Paul Prudence on Dataisnature]

Also: YesYesNoNo’s Invisible Journey’s (Datalooknise) project aims at mapping fields of Wi-Fi node signals during bike and car trips. Using various kinds of representation systems to visualise different properties of the nodes (such as encryption settings) these abstractions act as timelines of the journey and, at times, give the impression of some kind experimental music notation. Detailed information on the methods used to collect and apply the data is annotated with each image in the development sequence. More >>