Buying art via SMS

Reuters reports on a new mobile application at art auctioneer Saffronart, that allows patrons to bid for art and fine jewelry through a text message.

The application, which chief executive Dinesh Vazirani claims is a first for a fine-art auctioneer, allows collectors to preview sales, make bids and view auction results.

The application can be used for Saffronart's upcoming autumn auction of 95 works by modern and contemporary Indian artists including Akbar Padamsee, Subodh Gupta, Surendran Nair, S.H. Raza and Manjit Bawa, estimated at bringing in about $4.5 million.

San Francisco Symphony asks you to text final piece request

This Sunday, the San Francisco Symphony is playing a free concert at Dolores Park and is asking guests to text in their request for the final piece. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, this is the first time the Symphony has opened up to requests by SMS.

People can choose between Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, Overture to William Tell by Rossini or Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G Minor by Brahms. You just text in a keyword to a number and the symphony will play whatever wins.

This is part of the Symphony's larger efforts to get more tech savvy and appeal to a younger audience. Earlier this year, the symphony launched a social networking site that allows fans to share photos, read blogs and hold discussions

Texting at a Symphony? Yes, but Only to Select an Encore

A recent Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concert of classics like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, the conductor instructed audience members to take out their phones. The New York Times reports.

In an attempt to appeal to a younger audience, symphony administrators had decided to let the audience choose the encore by text-messaging votes: “A” for Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown,” or “B” for Wagner’s prelude to Act III of “Lohengrin.” (“Hoedown” won by 23 votes.)

The New York Philharmonic has also asked audience members to choose encores via text. In recent New York performances of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” by a small opera company, attendees used text messaging to decide which couples would end up together.

Other performances involving cell phones and audience participation

-- Actors carry cell phones in new "Misanthrope" production

-- Passerbys conduct orchestra in shop window with cell phones

-- «This Text Has Legs»

-- «Cellphones», a new Rock Musical

-- Cell phones and ringtones play part in new musical comedy

-- Cellphones join the orchestra

-- Ringtone Concert In Estonia

-- Text The Dancer

-- «Texterritory», an experimental interactive dance performance

-- «Text Messaging Theater»

-- Op Misses Opera Opp

Rendezvous At The Meeting Point

A rotary-dial-inspired meeting point installation spotted on Yanko Design. By designer Serdar Sişman.

Bring Your Cell Phone to the Opera, Please

A coming production of Mozart's opera “Così fan tutte” will ask audience members to vote at intermission for which characters should be married in the opera’s final scene. The New York Times reports.

The production, called "Così fan Tutte: Defining Women," will be performed by the Underworld Productions Opera Ensemble at Symphony Space in Manhattan on April 29 and 30, and it invites theatergoers to vote by sending text messages from their cell phones. Cast members will then perform the democratically chosen ending.

Museum of Broken Relationships

"It was 300 days too long. He gave me his cell phone so I couldn’t call him any more."

Museum Of Broken Relationships is a website and touring exhibition of stories and donated objects that represent broken relationships.

You can participate by donating an object and sharing a story. A donation form can be found at the museum's website. [via Guerilla Innovation]

The Museum offers every individual the chance to overcome the emotional collapse through creation, .e., by contributing to the holdings of the Museum. The individual gets rid of ‘controversial objects’, triggers of momentarily ‘undesirable’ emotions, by turning them into museum exhibits, i.e., artefacts and thereby participating in the creation of a preserved collective emotional history.

The user can ‘store’ in every directory whatever may still function of a trigger of a painful memory:

a) photographs,

b) existing e-mail messages (which can be sent directly from the user’s inbox to his own web directory,

c) SMS messages (which can also be sent directly from the user’s phone to the Museum web).

Chairman Mao's Little Red Cellphone

By artist Tavis Coburn for a Discovery Channel documentary on China's rising middle class.

[Gizmodo via Unplugged]

Text Messaging Embroidery

The artist took 19 text messages (from separate conversations) about love and romantic relationships and embroidered them, complete with message icons and battery and reception meters. View complete gallery here.

[via Switched]

Other related projects on Text Messaging Embroidery

TXTual Healing on a road trip for Obama

Paul Notzold is kicking off an interactive projection roadtrip with TXTual Healing for Barack Obama. 10 nights, 10 cities, and 4 states.

After doing an amazing job of registering voters, Obama’s people wanted to drum up excitement to actually get people to the polls with some TXTual Healing up until election day. Paul will be updating the site with photos and video from the road.

The Prayer Booth

Dylan Mortimer'sPublic Prayer Booth is a synthesis of a telephone booth and a prayer station. The viewer can flip down a kneeler and engage in prayer.

“My goal is to spark dialogue about a topic often avoided, and often treated cynically by the contemporary art world,” says Mortimer. “I employ the visual language of signage and public information systems, using them as a contemporary form of older religious communication systems: stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, church furniture, etc. I balance humor and seriousness, sarcasm and sincerity, in a way that bridges a subject matter that is often presented as heavy or difficult.”

[neatorama via trendsnow]

Improvisation for Two Altered Telephones

Régine form we-make-money-not-art.com gives a rave review for The Creative Interactions - The MobileMusicWorkshop 2004 - 2008 book, saying it's every bit as excellent and informative as the annual workshop itself.

The publication, edited by Nicolaj Kirisits, Frauke Behrendt, Lalya Gaye and Atau Tanaka, celebrates 5 years of Mobile Music Workshop.

The book collects all the projects presented over the workshops that ran from 2004 to 2008: title, abstract, bio of the artist(s) and some pictures. Super simple, clear and fascinating. One of them is described below:

I stumbled upon this ear-pleasing (there's an audio-sample on the webpage) performance from 1999: Improvisation for Two Altered Telephones. A performance by Julie Adler and Andrew Bucksbarg.

An AM/FM radio circuit was added to the phone interface. "The radio circuit produces sound when its speaker output is fed back into the circuit at various points and in varying degrees. The resulting sound is controlled through the phone keypad and a few added knobs (variable resisters). The mouthpiece is also soldered into the circuit and the vocalizations (or air pressure) become amplified and filtered by the radio circuit."

Send a quick txt to the pigeons

From next month, you can watch your words go up in smoke as part of an art installation in London's Trafalgar Square. [via The Guardian]

Called Memory Cloud, the work by architects/designers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos will, over three evenings in October, create a huge cloud of smoke on to which the artists will project messages sent by members of the public via text message.

Those of a sensitive disposition may need to look away - all the messages will be projected uncensored.

Its' first performance was in Bristol in June 2007, called Smoke Signals.

Related:

-- Paul Notzold's Txtual Healing performances around the world.

-- The HelloWorld Project - text messages were projected by a laser beam on mountains and buildings in several cities in 2003

-- Hello Mr President - A laser projector beamed messages onto the snow during the Davos WEF summit in 2001

Manifesta 7: Tantalum Memorial - Residue

Régine Debatty is just back from Just back from Manifesta, the seventh edition of a touring art biennale held in Trentino, Italy. She writes up an exhibit related to cell phones on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com.

Tantalum Memorial - Residue, by England-based Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, is a telephony-based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the tantalum wars in the Congo.

The installation below is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory.

The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire - a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number.

This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of "radio trottoire" or "pavement radio", the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship."

Cell phones as art. A recap of stunning examples

Artwork that focuses on the mobile phone from dialaphone. Most have been posted on textually before, but it's nice to have them all gathered in one place.

One of my favorites, above, was a multi-media art project completed in Germany in 2000. "Old mobile phones were artistically decorated by children to make the phones look like birds. The bird-phones were then placed into an artistic background resembling a tree. The phones had been programmed with bird calls that occasionally rang from the art exhibit."

More works here and here.

Finally, We Hear One Another

Finally, We Hear One Another is a work by Kelly Andres that enables people to experience each other's soundscapes.

Collaborating with the Mixed Reality Lab, Kelly made bonnet's fitted with a speaker and an extra 'ear' - a cone at the back of the bonnet that funnels sound to a microphone embedded in the fabric.

Signals are transmitted to a speaker in the bonnet of a partner user, via mobile telephone bluetooth.

[via we-make-money-not-art.com]

The Telemegaphone projects your voice across the fjord

August 2nd will be the grand opening of Telemegaphone Dale, a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.

Anyone can dial the Telemegaphone's phone number and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.

Your call to the Telemegaphone goes through directly, a bright light at the top of the pole is lit, and your voice rings out across the valley.

The installation is open for calls day and night until 6 September 2008.

"The Telemegaphone is a communication monument in a deliberate limbo between permanent public art installation and commercial phone service", says Erik Sandelin at Unsworn Industries, an interaction design and innovation studio based in Malmö, Sweden. "Even in Dale, a small village in the rural fjord-lands of Western Norway, the world can interfere, uncensored, at any moment."

The Telemegaphone is the first product from Unsworn Industires' new telecom division. Unsworn Telecom develops products and services for beautiful and surprising telecommunications.

The phone number for Telemegaphone Dale will be published at www.unsworn.org/telemegaphone during the opening at August 2.

Telemegaphone Dale is curated by Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir and is the first in a series of events produced by nkd - the nordic artists' centre in dale to celebrate 10 years of creative activity 1998 - 2008.

[via e-mail press release]

'UFO' Controlled Remotely by SMS

New York artist Peter Coffin teamed with London interactive architect Dominic Harris to launch a "UFO" of their own design earlier this month. The airborne mystery pod produced shock and awe among citizens of a small town last week when it hovered, lights aglow, in Gdansk, Poland.

Dubbed Peter Coffin's UFO Project, the 23-foot aluminum sauce can be remotely controlled by text messaging.

Photo: Michal Szlaga

[WIred via via Pixelsumo]

Telephone tree sends wrong signals, say villagers

When Barry Robinson saved three traditional red phone boxes from the scrapheap, neighbours applauded his stance on preserving British heritage. When he decided to mount them 20ft in the air on a girder in the middle of a village field in Warwickshire, they were not so impressed, claiming that the “telephone tree” is an eyesore.

[The Times Online via del.ici.us/regine]

A Day Without Cell Phones

The installation "A day without a mobile-phone", by Eve Arpo and Riin Kranna-Rõõs, is made up of cell phones collected from people. The phones are hanging 24 hours in a public space where they create a light and sound installation.

The installation was first created in Tallinn in September 2007. Now the project is travelling to different cities around the world and was last seen in Edmonton, Canada June 28th.

Watch the video on YouTube.

Click here for a write-up from last year's event held in Estonia.

"Unprotected Text". Text Message as Theater

Soemthing I missed dating back to last March and just found by chance on About Theater while searching for something else.

"Text message was part of a theatrical performance. By sending text messages to 143text@gmail.com and Unprotected Text analzyed your text messages and then performed them on YouTube for everyone to enjoy.

Many text messages should have make it into their live performances all over NYC in April."

"Unprotected Text is an Episodic Textual Adventure and sociological study exploring the integration of social interfaces with our daily lives. A research period will culminate in a series of performative public interventions, reclaiming the isolation that is a by-product of advanced virtual communication practices. Unprotected Text is a response to how text messaging affects our relationships and the way we communicate with each other. This project will provide a new way to interact with texts by unplugging the isolation of cell phone use, connecting audiences to temporal data, and by contributing to the reclamation and celebration of real-time community."

Watch Unprotected Text on YouTube.

Extraordinary Rendition

The Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid is currently running a (very timely) exhibition on the controversial topic of Extraordinary Rendition. The expression was coined by the Bush administration to define new legal measures designed to sidestep the existing Human Rights system and deprive some individuals from its protection in the name of the fight against terrorism.

Phone Home (2003), by Elmgreen & Dragset, is the only work on exhibit that has not been created specifically for the show. The installation looks at the loss of the right to privacy in communications. Five telephone cabins are lined up in the gallery.

A note informs visitors that they can call anyone they want in the world for free. Of course there's a trick: the conversation you are planning to have will be broadcast in the gallery, recorded and a table with audio players and headphones will enable future visitors to listen to what you said.

[via we-make-money-not-art.com]

How to Become a Mobile Phone Artist

Dialaphone has a piece on mobile phone art.

"There are all different sorts of mediums for tackling the mobile phone as an art subject; from mobile phone sculptures to paintings that send a message about the mobile phone in society.

But there is also a subsection of the mobile phone art movement which is specifically focused on actually creating art on the mobile phone.

Moreover, there are mobile communities through which you can then share this mobile art.

If you’re interested in being part of the trend (or you just think that the idea of creating and sharing mobile phone art is really cool) the following guide should help you along the path from fledgling cell phone artist to a mobile phone art creator in full bloom."

12 Stunning Examples of Mobile Phones as Art

A number of artists around the globe consider cell phones as an art form. They have created photography, sculptures and mixed media collages with the mobile phone as the center of the piece. Take a look at the following 12 images and see if they get you thinking about your phone in a new kind of light. [via Dialaphone]

When Apple and Art Come Together

Over at LAist, editor Zach Behrens has posted a piece on artist Nick Rodrigues' mixed-media installation known as the "Porta Party." A giant-sized iPod-like box where you go inside, bring your own iPod or iPhone, and groove to your favorite music.

[via TUAW]

Cell Phone Art Made With 5,000 phones

Rob Petit's cell phone art made of 5,000 mobile phones.

[via Gizmodo]

Nokia Morph Nanotechnology Concept Devices

Nokia announces Morph, a joint nanotechnology concept, developed by Nokia Research Center and the University of Cambridge. I4U reports.

Morph was launched today alongside the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition, on view from February 24 to May 12, 2008, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Morph is a concept that demonstrates how future mobile devices might be stretchable and flexible, allowing the user to transform their mobile device into radically different shapes. It demonstrates the ultimate functionality that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering: flexible materials, transparent electronics and self-cleaning surfaces.

The examples of Morph phone designs include a wrist phone and a translucent card that basically just consist of an interactive user interface. The future looks bright, once again.

Nokia press release

The city that never sleeps ... nor stops talking

What does the telecommunications traffic flowing in and out of New York City reveal about the city that never sleeps?

To find out, researchers from the senseable city laboratory at MIT have created a novel project that reveals the complex dynamics of talk that exist between New York and other cities around the globe. [via MIT News]

The project, called New York Talk Exchange (NYTE), is based around an analysis of telecommunications traffic flowing to and from New York City and will debut Feb. 24, 2008, as part of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, "Design and the Elastic Mind."

"We are interested in visualizing and exploring the connections that New York entertains with the rest of the world, how they change over the course of a day, and how the city's neighborhoods differ from each other by maintaining special and distinct relationships with particular cities and countries," said Kristian Kloeckl, project leader at the senseable city laboratory.

NYTE uses data flows from the AT&T network that measure the volume of Internet protocol (IP) and voice traffic flowing in and out of New York at a given time. These data are then projected as three large visualizations that will hang at MoMA, and will also be accessible over the web at http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte.

Read more.

Social Mobiles

Social Mobiles was a collaboration between IDEO and artist designer Crispin Jones in 2002. They presented 5 mobile phones - that each in a different way modify their users behaviour to make it less disruptive - to provoke discussion about the social impact of cell phones. [via we-make-money-not-art.com]

The electric shock mobile delivers a variable level of electric shock depending on how loudly the person at the other end is speaking. As a result, the two parties are induced to speak more quietly.

The speaking mobile allows the user to converse silently; a person receiving a call in a quiet space can respond without speaking, using simple but expressive sounds that they produce and intone manually.

The musical mobile requires the user to play the tune of the phone number they wish to call. The public performance that dialing demands acts as a litmus test of when it is appropriate to make a call.

The knocking mobile. The user knocks on this phone to communicate the urgency of their call. The recipient hears this knock through their phone and can be discerning about which call they answer.

The catapult mobile can be used to launch sounds into other people's phone conversations. This provides a direct yet discreet way of invading their space.

Fish Tank Phone Booth

Spotted on OhGizmo via DVICE, a fish tank phone booth.

It was designed by Benedetto Bufalino as part of the December Lyon Light Festival. In the designers own words:

“With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically coloured fish; an invitation to escape and travel.”

Also by the same designer, totally unrelated to cell phones but completely wonderful, a s series of sun hats, titled "Corniche des Chapeaux".

Ghost Town. An urban exploration game

Ghost Town, Giant Dice 's new innovative game of urban exploration played with the help of your mobile phone, is being unleashed on the streets of Perth for one week, starting December 2nd, 2007. The game uses a mashup of technology (bluetooth, SMS and VOIP) and the physical world.

With the aid of your mobile phone as your communication device with the ghosts, you'll uncover clues and solve puzzles to help unravel the mystery of who the ghosts are and why they were so cruelly imprisoned, all the while exploring some of Perth's most exciting places.