Mobile Phone controlled Xmas tree

Right before the holidays, mobswitch set up a remote controllable Xmas tree in Dresden, Germany.

Users can download the Switch-a-tree app for Android, to remote control the tree's light. A webcam takes a photo and everybody may have look how their Xmas tree looks like.

New Washington theater will encourage texting and cell phone use

A new theater -- not a movie theater, but a venue for plays and live musical performances -- opening near Seattle, Washington in 2014 is being built in such a manner as to encourage texting and "nondisruptive" cell phone use. IFC reports via Media Decoder.

This is the wave of the future for the people we worry about attracting," said John Haynes, the theater's executive director. "Simply forbidding it and embarrassing people is not the way to go. So we are wiring the building in anticipation of finding ways to make it work over time."

At The Tateuchi Center in Bellevue, Washington, those ways to make it work will include a building-specific cellphone antennae to boost reception and service inside the hall and the distribution of light-dimming screens to customers who plan on texting and updating their Facebook pages during the performance.

Read full article.

DoSomething.org Wants Teens To Text For Social Good

Through a new membership model Do Something is counting on text messages to create a movement of 5 million teenage activists by 2015. Can they get Generation Text to care about poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease? FastCompany reports.

Cellphones, Nancy Lublin, CEO and chief “old person” at DoSomething.org, believes are the key to getting teens to act. DoSomething.org isn't asking for donations, it simply wants to continue to grow its platform to get more youth fired up about social causes. And targeting those under 18 can have a formidable impact on social change.

Read more.

Leading artists create mobile art

s[edition] is a new website that allows art lovers to collect art on their cell phones or iPads.

According to the BBC, s[edition] offers limited edition contemporary art for mobile phones, designed by the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

The original authenticated artwork can be downloaded for display on phones, tablets, computers and TVs.

Works will be created in limited runs of between 2,000 and 10,000 and will cost between £5 and £500.

Read more.

Related:

-- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts brought the artwork of Andy Warhol to cell phones. (2009)

-- The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston allows users to wirelessly download Museum masterpieces to cell phones and other mobile devices. (2007)

-- START SOMA, the San Francisco gallery for emerging artists, launched STRAT MOBILE, a retail art gallery to sell New Art for cell phones. (2005)

-- Wooster Collective Mobile Wooster Mobile is a Wooster curated art gallery of images which you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world. (2005)

-- Masterpiece painting for cell phones SK Telecom announced that it's NATE service will provide customers with viewing access to 80 selected art masterpieces from the collection of "400 Years of Western Art from Poussin to Matisse". (2004)

-- Famous artwork for cell phone screens 123Multimedia, a French producer of logos and ringtones, launched of a series of "Master Painting" wallpaper designs for cell phone screens. (2003)

-- Contemporary artists create artwork for cell phone screens In November 2003, See My SMS, a Paris based company run by Alexandra de Waresquiel, signed up over 25 contemporary artists, whose artwork could be downloaded onto cell phones; Jeanne SUSPLUGAS, Anne DELEPORTE, Sam SAMORE, Susan SHUP et François-xavier COURREGES all created original artwork for this project. (2003)

Talk to Me art show at MOMA

In “Talk to Me,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art, objects and people interact using cellphones, Twitter, video games and other forms of technology.

The exhibition focuses on objects that involve a direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, visualization design, and communication devices, and on projects that establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users.

Examples range from a few iconic products of the late 1960s to several projects currently in development—including computer and machine interfaces, websites, video games, devices and tools, furniture and physical products, and extending to installations and whole environments.

[via The New York Times]

Astrid Phone makes you engage your whole body

Astrid is a new kind of mobile phone, created by artist group You Must Relax from Tallinn, Estonia.

The phone, which is over two meters high, is currently located in the foyer of KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn and available for visitors to make phone-calls.

Because of its size the phone has lost the essential characteristics of a mobile phone - mobility and intimacy. When visitors use the device, they have to engage their entire bodies to push the buttons and talk into the microphone.

Watch a video of Astrid.

This is what one visitor told us about Astrid: “We went to KUMU to make phone calls with Astrid. Kids were excited and a security guard amused, when he heard what my kids were talking about with grand mother. I was embarrassed – all the people at the lobby heardeverything! Grandma did not understand a thing and the audience was amused.”

This artwork is currently part of an international exhibition Gateways.

Visualizing SMS messages using paper airplanes

Christian Groß was given an assignment in class – to take existing data and use it to create a visual or audio representation, using the coding framework, Processing. That is how the SMS to Paper Airplanes project came to exist. The NextWeb reports.

Groß tapped into his long distance relationship with his girlfriend, using the SMS messages that they sent back and forth from September 2010 to April 2011. The visual representation of the SMS message that Groß chose was the paper airplane.

The result was a whimsical display of 369 messages in the delicate form of paper airplanes.

Read more.

Human Powered Text Message Printer Wins RedBull Challenge

For the RedBull Creation challenge, teams of inventors were asked to create the future. They were given a theme and 72 hours to build something useful, imaginative, and inspiring. PSFK reports.

Using mostly scavenged materials, teams were challenged to creatively move a person from one point to another without using any fossil fuels for propulsion energy.

A human-sized hamster wheel which was wired into a mobile network won first prize.*

The winning team gave the its own phone number and invited attendees at the event to send single word text messages to it.

Suspended from the back of the wheel was a series of actuator driven spray cans which would print out each of the submitted words on a roll of paper as the person in the wheel walked forward.

The wheel could handle 60,000 one word messages which would probably be enough to print a text string completely around the edge of Manhattan.

*The winning team was Jigawatts from Minneapolis, MN. Together Dillon Hodapp, Nathan Knutson, Ben Arcand and Dave Heisserer.

Read full article.

Caught In the Act of Texting

Award-winning professional photographer Joseph Holmes, in his series "Texters," turns something we see everyday—people just tapping away at the phones—into works of art. Shot over a two-month period, they're like little slices of life.

Check out more pictures on Flickr.

[via Gizmodo, engadget and The New York Times]

Art Installation Uses Audience's Text Messages As Inspiration

Passersby communicate with performance artists via text at the Lower Manhattan installation of “The Attendants.” NY1 reports.

“If you have an urge to communicate with performers inside the cube, you can communicate by texting a message into the cube and the performers can respond to that message. The message, once you text it in, turns up on the screens and it can be seen by both the audience outside the cube and also by the performers inside the cube.

There was also a live stream online with a spot for sending a message in from anywhere around the globe.

Watch video.

"It's for you," Conceptual Art and the Telephone

'It's for you ' at HCC art gallery in Bridgeport CT, explores telephone use in modern society. ctpost.com reports.

We use it for business and pleasure, to close deals and to open discussions, to make love and to make amends, to order pizza and to bring order to one's life, to access information or to impart it.

It's the telephone, that extraordinary instrument that connects us to the world that exists beyond our home or office.

"Many of the artists in the exhibition aim to democratize the artist/audience relationship, a quality that is intricately woven into the history of conceptual art."

One such artist is Yoko Ono, who created a piece especially for the HMA show.

Read more.

DEAR COPENHAGEN... by SMS

From Guerrilla-Innovation, Dear Copenhagen, a micro-political web-platform that allows users to leave text messages to the City of Copenhagen.

Messages are created on virtual post-it notes in different colors according to topic. By default, they all begin with "Kære København" (Dear Copenhagen) and users have 250 characters to express themselves.

Judging from the current top-30 list of most liked messages, Copenhageners are primarily concerned with traffic issues (yellow notes) closely followed by cultural issues (turquoise notes). Messages regarding social issues (red notes) barely make it into the list. Perhaps there are no urgent social problems in Copenhagen, or perhaps those who have them are not on the web?

SMS slingshot: Digital Text Messages on Urban Facades

Guerilla Innovation on the SMS slingshot, a device designed to create digital augmented realities in urban space.

The device is shaped as a wooden slingshot with a build-in mobile phone display, a keypad and a laser. Users can type a text message and shoot it straight at a large facade. A projector pointed at the facade will show the message as a colour splash with the message written within.

The project is designed by VR/URBAN, a group of digital intervention-activists based in Berlin. They will demonstrate the device at various media-festival in the next couple of months. Check their website for dates and technical specs. And watch video demo. Fab!

Orchestra seeks audience by SMS

The New York Times on how orchestras in the US are using text messaging to get their audiences to vote for encore or to take advantage of discounts for upcoming performances.

The texting tends to be solicited at outdoor performances, at which audiences are larger and include many people who are not regular concertgoers. It is also easier to take out a cellphone in the open air than in the confines of a concert hall. Sometimes the return texts are one-time messages: a taste of spam with your Brahms. In other cases orchestras are hoping to establish long-term textual relationships.

Read full article.

"Talking Art" Interactive Installation

If a work of art could talk, what would it say? Right now visitors at the Göteborg Museum of Art are encouraged to give voice to selected works of art in the interactive installing "Talking Art".

Upon entering the museum, the visitor downloads an application on his mobile phone. The phone then acts as a tour guide to the works, giving background information. At given intervals, the visitor is asked to interpret a work of art by sending a text from his cell phone to a physical sign equipped with a LED display.

The "Talking Art" exhibition consists of three themes that are running in series; "Power & Beauty", "Love & Horror" and "Art History 2."

The participants answers and commentaries are saved in a database, and there are plans to create a exhibition summarizing them after "Talking Art" is concluded.

The exhibition opened in January, runs through the summer.

[via milk.se and e-mail press release.]

UNLIMITXT: Photographer Explores Global Texting Behaviors

Photographer Dennis Rito has put together a conceptual series called UNLIMITXT. In it, he explores mediated interpersonal communication through text messaging. [via MobileBehavior]

In his own words:

Mobile phones are impacting societies around the world. In the Philippines, text messaging is considered to be the most exploited service due to its affordability, convenience and immediacy. According to industry estimates, 2 billion text messages were sent everyday from the 60 percent of the population of 90 million who uses mobile phones. This has led to the popular notion of the Philippines as the “texting capital of the world”.

I am interested on how mobile technology affects society and the individual. Face-to-face conversation has now been replaced by virtual means thus texting has made it possible to create new unsurveilled and unconventional relationships. Texting also allows its users to create a seemingly private world capable of expressing real and virtual emotions.

Through my photographs I am attempting to explore the texter’s virtual world and invite the viewers to reflect upon what these expressions reveal about their elationship with the intended recipient.

TXTual Healing's latest installations

TXTual Healing's latest interactive text messaging projects:

-- Golden Goddess - Video above. The audience text messages in the thoughts of the woman on the bed making love. The interactive installing is making it’s rounds from NYC to France.

-- MC TXT (emcee tee ex tee) - It's interactive freestyle rap. The audience text messages in the lines that the mc's rhyme off of. It quite rowdy and wild and all done in real time, the mc's don't know what's coming.

Links to other TXTual Healing installations followed on this blog over the years.

Cell phone Mobile plays Christmas Music

Experience Mobile Mobile from James Théophane Jnr on Vimeo.

Spotted on Cnet, a "mobile mobile" playing Christmas music.

Other mobile mobile installations:

-- 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.

-- Cell Phone Art Made With 5,000 phones - Rob Petit's cell phone art made of 5,000 mobile phones.

-- "Casa de Pedra" walls made of cell phones - The "Casa de Pedra" - or the House of Stone in Sao Paulo, whose walls are covered with typewriters and mobile phones, amongst many other objects.

-- Cell Phone Disco, an experimental installation, made of flashing cells, that allows gallery visitors to experience the invisible body of the mobile phone.

-- Videos Lustre by Beatrice Valentineamrhein features dozens of cell phones hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier, each running a short film on the cell phone’s screen.

Guerrila Innovation. SMS Enabled Art Toilet at The Danish National Gallery

From Guerilla Innovation:

In conjunction with a music event held outside the The National Gallery in Copenhagen earlier this summer, the gallery introduced a new kind of service: Art Toilets.

Besides being cleaned after each visit, the Art Toilets were equipped with art magazines and posters, thereby turning the trivial and potential unpleasant activity into a somewhat nice and memorable experience.

To access the Art Toilets, users were required to send an SMS to a dedicated number, which in return gave them a virtual toilet token, free of charge.

The phone numbers were collected and later used by the National Gallery to kick start a new SMS service.

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."