A human heartbeat activated by cell phone, to stay close to your child

Remote Heart is a project by Daniel Goddemeyer for the MA Royal College of Art Behavioural Concepts, whereby a human heartbeat is activated by cell phone, and transmitted to a doll held by a child who has been separated from his parents. For instance, his first days at kindergarten or a hospitalization. Remote Heart provides an intimate and meaningful way for the child to feel close to his parents.

In his own words:Situations where children are separated from their parents often provide a problem especially for younger children. In these situations it is important for the child that she / he feels close to his parents and for them, to be able to provide a simple, but yet meaningful way of staying close to the child.

Transmitting the heartbeat...
When placed over a human heart the heartbeart receiver transmits the recognized heartbeat via bluetooth to the mobile phone. Using the mobile phone GSM network the heartbeat is then transmitted to the doll, which then displayes the received heartbeat with it's physical beating heart.

The doll's physical beating heart takes over the remote human heartbeat of a person. As long as the heartbeat sender is held over a human heart it transmit the heartbeat to the doll in realtime.

When parent and child are separated for periods of time, such as when a young child has to be hospitalized or is e.g. for the first time away in kindergarten, the remote heart doll provides an intimate and meaningful way for the child to feel close to his parents.

Stitching Together: texting message sewing circle

Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström's, two artists living in Sweden and working at the Växjö
Interactive Institute, have set up a text messaging sewing circle called Stitching Together, which combines text messaging and traditional embroidery.

In Stitching Together, groups and random exhibition visitors can actually participate in creating the work: they can send text messages to a computer-controlled sewing machine, which embroiders them onto a piece of cloth. These embroidered items are then displayed.

Most of us have text messages in our mobile phones that we do not want to throw away. They are connected to places, situations and people we love, hate, miss and in any case have a relation to.

In stitching together we invite you and other text message-users to share text messages and transform them into tangible and physical text messages made out of thread and fabric. We want to make it possible for you to make these intimate, digital treasures longer lasting and stitch together different techniques, different speeds, people of different ages and different usage of communication. channels.

Related projects:

-- EMS craft project - EMS is a mobile phone craft project created for the New Forms Festival 2004 by Kate Pemberton. Designs have been created that can be accessed using your mobile phone, and as patterns to cross stitch.

-- SMS messages become embroidered - UK-based artist Kate Pemberton describes how she's been working on a project called SMS (short message samplers) these are embroidered picture messages used on mobile phones.

Pocket Gamelan

we-make-money-not-art.com reviews Pocket Gamelan by Greg Schiemer and Mark Havryliv, an interactive musical interface allowing non-expert performers to create microtonal music using bluetooth-enabled mobile phones.

"Players swing the handsets on the end of a cord in a circular trajectory. As the phone is swung it produces audible artefacts such as Doppler shift and chorusing which are generated as a bi-product of movement. The device works like a network of operations in which melodies and the speed at which they’re played can be altered."

Drip TXT

Tag like a pro from your mobile phone! Using a projector, a computer, and a homemade mobile SMS gateway, watch as your projected text message is spelled out in the digitally captured writing style of NYC Graffiti Artist Jesus Saves.

Don't use your mobile phone to escape your surroundings, use it to engage it and speak out.

Created by Paul Notzold and Adam Chapman. More photos and info at... TXTual Healing

Play: Dead Man's Cell Phone'

Sarah's Ruhl's 'Dead Man's Cell Phone' is to Premiere in D.C. beginning June 4, reports Playbill.

"How much could someone learn about you if they found your cell phone - and started answering your calls?

"From the lyrical author of The Clean House comes this oddly mythic love story in which a lonely woman, Jean, answers the cell phone of a stranger, Gordon, and finds herself the unwitting guardian of his memory.

Traveling literally to hell and back, Ruhl's quirky comedy is set amidst a world where technology is swallowing our souls, grieving is more complicated than we think, and everyone is desperate to make connections."

Mobile Plassages

Mobile Plassages was last year's final project by Junu Joseph Yang as an interaction design student at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea/Domus in Milan.

Mobile Plassages started from some ideas about how people can ‘stay in touch’ through play and hypothesizes and explores how digital communication mediums can be exploited into, rules for playfully staying in touch, in context of our everyday mobile landscapes.

What it is: A series of three mobile play limbs were developed to exemplify the potentials of this play platform:

Voice Collector is an auditory vessel that feeds on the EM fields around us to offer communication.

View Finder is a visual messaging lens that allows one to animate and discover hidden images from the environment.

Trail Messenger is a virtual dot-dropper that lets people expressively perform and discover messages by walking around and ‘connecting the dots.’

AreYouHere?

AreYouHere? is an urban mobile game that aims to explore Venice through its inhabitants/migrants. AreYouHere? is one of the 12 urban interventions of Migration Addicts, 52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Collateral events. [via we-make-money-not-art.com]

AreYouHere? is an urban exploration through the faces of the people anyone can meet during his/her stay. Faces of migrants that have become the actual inhabitants, while the player is the stranger.
A touristic and personal exploration of people and their faces. Those photos will be joined together into a personal postcard. He/she will receive the postcard at home. A postcard that is actually sent by him/herself.

The player will receive the postcard to his/her home: a postcard that is actually sent by him/herself.. But the places you are supposed to visit, however, are not the ones you would expect to go, the top visited.

Museums Team Up For Mobile Content

A number of museums have joined together to create Museum On The Go, which will offer images of famous works of art, photographs of historic personalities, voice and sound recordings, music and video for download to mobile devices. [via MocoNews]

Some featured personalities Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Egon Schiele, Sigmund Freud, Kaiser Franz Joseph, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Albrecht Dürer, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Titian, Caravaggio, Empress Elisabeth "Sissi", Emperor Franz Joseph I., ...

Participating museums are : the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Leopold Museum, Sigmund Freud Museum, Austrian Mediathek, Erich Lessing Archive, all in Vienna, Austria; Museum of Natural History, Sound Archive of the of the Humboldt-University, both Berlin, Germany and the National Sound Archives in Jerusalem, Israel:

press release

Pay phone murder mystery

Régine on we-make-money-not-art.com, writes about Ryan Holsopple's launch of a public pay phone who-dunnit that invites people to make a toll-free call from any public pay phone in Canal Street Station and solve a murder mystery.

Set in the maze of tiles that make up the station, the Canal Street Station game puts participants in the shoes of a private investigator, as he searches the depths of Canal Street Station for a young French woman that may have committed a murder, or may be a figment of his own imagination.

Read more + interview of artist

Paul Notzold street performance projecting in Rome

Paul Notzold's latest projecting, from his Rome trip.

Rome-ing Charges : 4 nights 4 interactive projections around Rome. As part of the Urban Portraits project Paul Notzold and Fabio Compagna put up SMS enabled speech bubbles all over Rome, ending the tour with a projection on the Colosseum.

Many more photos at www.txtualhealing.com.

Fabio arranged electricity from a restaurant across the street from the Colloseum and we threw a bubble up. Besides the bus pulling up and 'beamer blocking' about every 15 minutes the bubble was legible from about 50 yards away and through street lights. I was using a 3500 Lumens projector.

At the end of the night I took all the messages received and ran them through TXT-A-Sketch to create a line art interpretation of all the messages received...

MOOD

A bunch of young men and women in the Contemporary Museum are wielding evolution's greatest gift -- opposable thumbs -- with an agility Darwin would admire. Digits fly as each person responds to the anonymous text messages being sent to their Nokias, Sony Ericssons or LGs. [via The Washington Post]

Excerpts:

"The barrage of questions are part of a one-night-only performance of student-made, cellphone-based artwork. Called "Mood," it is the creation of a trio of Maryland Institute College of Art students.

Willing museum visitors are handed business cards upon entering the gallery telling them to send the word "mood" as a text message to a particular phone number in 240 area code. A few seconds later, a text message pops up on their mobiles. It comes in the form of a question.

... As numeric replies accumulate in the artwork's computer, a real-time image screens the word "MOOD," which changes color along with audience disposition. Tonight, the mood of these 70-odd visitors, many MICA students and their supporters, is predominantly blue.

Turns out this very current media art is based on that old hippie staple, the mood ring. Like that just-for-kicks bauble, "Mood" doesn't make claims to empirical analysis. In fact, Michael Ries, a 33-year-old MICA senior who is one of the work's authors, explains that "everything comes together and washes out." By the law of averages, one person's good mood cancels another's black one. The data collected in "Mood" collapses into a familiar bell curve. Ries and his two collaborators, Yeohyun Ahn and Joel Bobeck, hope to create an ever-expanding databank for future cellphone works.

"Mood" was performed at the museum Thursday night as part of the Contemporary Museum's larger "Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone" exhibition, which runs through April 22. The show includes artists and collectives manipulating mobile phone technology in a variety of ways; Golin Levin conducted a cellphone symphony while Amsterdam-based collective Informationlab captures visitor phone signals that trigger dancing LED lights.

Related: - Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone

Portage will create a virtual theatre, controlled by cell phone users

Portage, Ontario College of Art & Design's mobile media lab, will create a virtual theatre, a vibrant entertainment park, on a downtown Toronto street, installing a number of experiences in the John Street corridor that are triggered or controlled by cell phone users.

These experiences are "locative" - that is, they provide cultural or information content relevant to a specific geographic environment. They're also interactive. Players can change content, upload information and experience the environment they're in by interacting with content that changes as they move through the street.

And cultural producers can use the underlying technology, a new design engine called MEE, to port their content - be it an "indie" film short or a virtual museum tour - to the cell phone.

[GaggleScape via digg ]

The Handphone Table

The Handphone Table, made by Laurie Anderson in 1978, is part of the collection of Lyon's Museum of Contemporary Art , posted by Pasta and Vinegar in 2005 - something I missed at the time. [via we-make-money-not-art.com]

When the listeners put their elbows on the table and cover their ears with hands, they can hear the sounds coming through wood and bones of their own arms which, similarly to wood, have a porous structure.The principle of the performance of Handphone Table bases on the conduction of sound through bones.

Stereophonic music in low ranges is strengthened and processed to the form of impulses, spread through metal bars connecting with four points on the inner surface of the table top."

Permanently Unfinished House with Cell Phone Tree

“Permanently Unfinished House with Cell Phone Tree”, a project by by Marjetica Potrc, is a cell tower is disguised as a tree. The house remains unfinished, so the owners can avoid paying taxes. Visual pollution and deregulation shape both the built and the natural environments.

[via Work]

Embroidered Conversations

One minute telephone conversations embroidered into ‘home sweet home’ frames by artist Louisa Bufardeci. [via Hulger.org]

13 captured telephone conversations - all one minute long captures the sense of paranoia generated by the idea that anyone could be listening in, anytime. These particular thirteen conversations are sourced from a mixture of conversations history known to have been tapped, conversations from my private home, and conversations between abstract people.

Related:

-- SMS messages become embroidered - UK-based artist Kate Pemberton describes how she's been working on a project called SMS (short message samplers) these are embroidered picture messages used on mobile phones

-- A mobile phone craft project - Designs have been created that can be accessed using your mobile phone, and as patterns to cross stitch.

Mobile Phone Abusers Anonymous

Mobile Phone Abusers Anonymous (MPAA) presented by Hwa Young Jung at the Takeaway Festival, is a fellowship of men and women who bring together their hope, strength and experience to solve their common problem: addiction to the mobile phone. [via we-make-money-not-art.com]

The only requirement for membership is a desire to take control of one’s communication habit.

Their primary purpose is to foster awareness of the mobile phone — the devastation it can cause, and the salvation it can offer. They do this by offering meetings, mobile phone discussions, replacement products, activities and much much more.

How did it start?

MPAA was formed in March of 2005 by Hwa Young Jung. The realisation of a need for the organisation came about whilst she was working for a design company creating mobile GUIs; what started off as research project into user behaviour lead to the discovery of an underbelly of obsesssive and destructive forms of human behaviour centred around the radical technology of ubiquitous communications – primarily, the mobile phone. She recognized these addictive behaviors for what they were, and strove to open a safetey net of discourse for addicts and their loved ones. Together with like minded people, MPAA was born. She currently uses a Nokia 6600, her 4th handset, and only uses SMS on trains.

Blogged previously:

-- Mobile Phone Abusers Anonymous in collaboration with Someth;ng.

-- Mobile Phone Abusers Anonymous: The Town Crier performance

One bear, one elephant, and three people on the phone

Hey, something for me at Régine's place. Thank you!

The Amerika gallery in Berlin is showing an amusing exhibition called One bear, one elephant, and three people on the phone.

Viktoria Binschtok's B&W pictures captures people busy with texting messages or being on the phone

We are observing people who are busy - sometimes fussily, sometimes bored, individually or in a crowd - with texting messages or being on the phone. At first, it seems unspectacular, yet their composure, mimic and gesture reflect the complete kaleidoscope of emotions. Obviously the mobile phone appears to be as much a personal sheet anchor as a necessary connection to the outside world.

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

project[nexus*]

This project by Madrid Abierto seeks to raise sensitivity on the loss of privacy which we are heading towards and, at the same time, to experiment with the new creative language offered by the new media.

Systems are installed that send sms/mms to all passers-by carrying a mobile phone and who cross a previously established area, thereby distributing a number of messages/images generated by the [nexus*]artgroup. Each passer-by crossing a hot-spot receives a message/image in his/her terminal.

... It is a communicative initiative that aims to raise the shock of the message.

Karina explains it all on mobuzzTV.

Phone Booths come to life

[via Frostfire]

TXT-A-Sketch

Paul Notzold, working with Federico Hatoum, have been working on a community drawing tool that allows you to use SMS to draw on buildings.

The piece will debut in the Streets of Rome, Italy from March 1 - 3. TXTual Healing and TXT-A-Sketch will both be on view as part of the Urban Portraits show at rialtosantambrogio.org.

[Wooster Collectible via Eyebeam Reblog]

In their own words:

Send a txt message and the system turns pairs of letters into points, and then lines connect the points. It's an X & Y axis using the alphabet to make coordinates... The whole thing is projected onto a building facade. See what your name looks like, or get creative and draw objects and symbols.

'Cell Phone': Art in the Palm of Your Hand

Michael O'Sullivan for The Washington Post writes up "Cell Phone Disco" and other exhibits, part of the Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone, an exhibition organized by the Contemporary Museum and held in Baltimore from January 21 to April 22 which explores some of the groundbreaking works that are being created by artists today using cell phone technologies. These works engage such features and technologies as camera phones, video phones, global positioning systems, Bluetooth technology, ring tone sounds, and messaging.

"Cell Phone Disco," by the Amsterdam-based collaborative Informationlab allows viewers to use their cellphones' signal strength to control hundreds of lights.

"Using your cellphone's signal strength to activate panels studded with hundreds of red LEDs, "Disco" creates a visual metaphor for the invisible technology that follows us seemingly everywhere.

But my real tech-lust came while watching some of the micro-mini-videos commissioned, starting in 2004, by Nokia, the cellphone giant and -- no surprise -- one of the show's sponsors. Participants in the "Connect to Art" initiative include such art stars as William Wegman and David Salle, but I especially liked the interpretive dances to anger, love, joy, sorrow and fear featured in Finnish artist Kati Aberg's little clips (free and downloadable to your mobile phone, like the others, from http://www.nokia.com/art/mobile)."

Previously: - Cell Phone Art and the Mobile Phone

Office Devices Modified to Make Employees Look Good

Designer Alice Wang has modified devices used in a typical office environment (computers, cell phones, printers, earphones) to make employees faced with peer pressure, look good and create a good impression. [via we-make-money-not-art.com]

-- The popular mobile is meant to make a worker look popular. By beeping at regular intervals, it makes people who are listening believe that text messages are coming in.

-- The fast typing keyboard is for slow typers - so no one notices.

-- The positive printer generates positive rumors about an employee. It filters his/her e-mail box and prints out all positive messages automatically.

-- The double sided headphone is for people who are not sure of their music taste and worry they will be judged by the (wrong) kind of music they listen to. The headphone has two tracks and plays one track inwards and one track outwards with different music simultaneously.

See work in progress here.

Mega Plotter, an interactive installation

The Mega Plotter is is an interactive installation by Mads Wahlberg.

The installation consists of a 5×7 metre large canvas. An X-Y-moveable system with industrial paint spray guns with the colours red, green, blue and yellow were mounted in front of the canvas.

The X-Y-movable system was computer and mobile phone-controlled. By dialling a particular phone number, visitors at the Danish musical festival, Skanderborg Festival, were able to control the plotter with the keyboard of their mobile phones.

By pressing the star, zero or pound keys, users could choose between the different colours of paint. By pressing the 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys they were able to control the movement of the plotter horizontally and vertically, and by pressing the 1, 3, 7, and 9 keys they were able to control the movement diagonally, creating imaginative drawings.

The installation has been set up two times at the Skanderborg Festival, in 2005.

[via Digital Experience]

Rock 'N' Scroll

Rock N' Scroll by Annina Rüst is a software infrastructure for interventions into wifi-equipped public space.

"Imagine walking into a coffee shop or another semi-public wifi-equipped place where people normally congregate quietly with their laptops: instead of working unbudgingly on their computers, they are shaking their office equipment and wildly tapping their cell phones.

Both mobile phones and computers are connected using Skype VOIP software. This creates delay effects depending on how good the network connection is. The sound itself is a combination of standard macintosh and windows sounds, as well as sounds that included in the Skype software, and pre-made drumloops.

Check out pictures and videos here.

Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone

Artists are discovering the aesthetic potential of cell phones writes the Baltimore Sun, reporting on a cell phone exhibit showing at Maryland's Contemporary Museum.

"Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone explores some of the groundbreaking works that are being created by artists today using cell phone technologies. These works engage such features and technologies as camera phones, video phones, global positioning systems, Bluetooth technology, ring tone sounds, and messaging.

Cell Phone features an international group of over 30 artists and artist collectives representing the range of artworks being created with and for a mobile phone device. Some of the works in Cell Phone take the form of a sculptural object, like Beatrice Valentine Amrhein’s Videos Lustre (2006) which features dozens of cell phones hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier (picture left), each running a short film on the cell phone’s screen.

Other works, like TXTual Healing (2002-2007) by Paul Notzold, or cell:block (2007) by the artist collective URBANtells, invite the audience to contribute content to a work through text messages or photos sent from their cell phones.

Another category of works in the exhibition include those that involve downloading a program, a video, or an image to your mobile device. Angie Waller’s clip.fm, for example, expands the communicative possibilities of cell phones through a series of narrative animations that can be downloaded and sent to friends instead of a text message.

Other works like Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden (2004-2006) or Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) introduce software to a mobile device that allows audience members to participate with others in an interactive performance. Making a call from a cell phone will connect visitors with yet another group of works in the exhibition.

Talking on a cell phone while walking through Informationlab’s room-sized installation Cell Phone Disco (2006), for example, will make visible the aura of an active cell phone’s signal by creating a trace of blinking lights on the gallery walls.

In other works, a phone number will be given to access pieces such as Steve Bradley’s Call & Response: HydroSistrum which willnvite visitors to dial a number to listen to data related to the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay, including information about water quality, currents, and temperature.

Related

-- Information Lab

-- Suite.tekora.com

Audio Theatre on your Mobile Phone

True Secrets is a sticker narrative project in Melbourne. Inspired by the highly popular sticker art of Yellow Arrow the stickers are placed in the street with a call-to-action to call a phone number. [via networked performance]

“There are secrets in this city. True Secrets’ detectives have uncovered a treasure chest of urban tales, rumors and lost news stories. Zoom into the story and be swept back in time with these high-quality, site-specific, immersive audio dramas.”
Related:

-- mobotabg

-- 'Wireless tours' to boost tourism

-- Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and Portable Phones

-- Cell phone users dial into a new trend: Handy-dandy tours

-- Dream On: Celebs Lead Local Walking Tours

-- Cell phone walking tour

-- Talking Street

iPhone Papercraft Model

A paper iPhone. Already! Made by Matt J. [via Gizmodo]

Other paper cell phone concepts:

-- Paper Covered Phone

-- Joseph Wu's Origami cell phone

-- The Origami Cell Phone

-- Design Concept: Paper Cellphone

And a disposable cell phone concept:

-- The Phone-Card-Phone

Voice over IP controlled Slot Cars

Speed Dial invites people to call a number and yell into their mobile phones to control the speed of two toy slot cars zooming around a racing track.

The project is made of a standard Slot Car track, hacked to run off incoming voice data. Voice data is sent serially to the cars via Arduino, replacing the stock controllers.

A work by Christopher Paretti.

Related:

-- Cellphone Operated Remote Control Car
-- Cell phone-activated car starter.

The Megaphone 3000

MegaPhone 3000 is a collection of 10 mini games that are played on a large screen with a cell phone. No special software is necessary. All games are controlled with either the player's voice or number pad. Players battle to stay connected- the loser gets booted and the winner battles on.

Two users call into the MegaPhone 3000. The first person to call gets to choose one of 10 "mini games": 0-9 on their keypad. The game is designed to last for approximately 5 seconds. The loser is disconnected and the winner gets to battle the next challenger. The winner cannot play a game they've already won. If the winner wins all 10 games then they can put their initials in the hall of fame.

Developed by Christopher D Kairalla and Jury Hahn.

Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone

Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone , at the the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, will explore some of the groundbreaking works that are being created by artists today using cell phone technologies. These works engage such features and technologies as camera phones, video phones, GPS, Bluetooth, ringtones, and messaging.

Cell Phone features 30 artists and artist collectives representing the range of artworks being created with and for a mobile phone device.

Some of the works in Cell Phone take the form of a sculptural object, like Beatrice Valentine Amrhein’s Videos Lustre which features dozens of cell phones hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier, each running a short film on the cell phone’s screen. Other works, like TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold, or cell:block by URBANtells, invite the audience to contribute content to a work through SMS or photos sent from their cell phones.

Another category of works include those that involve downloading a program, a video, or an image to your mobile device. Angie Waller’s clip.fm, for example, expands the communicative possibilities of cell phones through a series of narrative animations that can be downloaded and sent to friends instead of a text message. Other works like Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden or Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You allows audience members to participate with others in an interactive performance. Making a call from a cell phone will connect visitors with yet another group of works in the exhibition. Talking on a cell phone while walking through Informationlab’s room-sized installation Cell Phone Disco, for example, will make visible the aura of an active cell phone’s signal by creating a trace of blinking lights on the gallery walls. In other works, a phone number will be given to access pieces such as Steve Bradley’s Call & Response: HydroSistrum which will invite visitors to dial a number to listen to data related to the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay, including information about water quality, currents, and temperature.

The exhibition runs January 21 - April 22, 2007.