Mobile phones are coming into their own as an artistic medium, creating a visual language that everyone can use, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
It must be the smallest canvas available to an artist, measuring an inch and a half by an inch and a half, or 3 cm square, and of course it's digital, so how can this be the gallery of the future? And not just the gallery but also the medium, the toolbox, the palette?
Is mobile phone art just another manifestation of the creative desperation to observe and experience novelty or is there, somewhere beyond the 2 megapixel barrier (the current limit to photo definition on a mobile phone camera) a new type of creative opportunity?
According to some observers, camera phone art is creating a new visual language, one that is open and available to all, and not least because the medium is at the same time both limited in its capabilities as a camera and also extensively connected, making it a more powerful medium than any physical exhibition space.
The idea that the mobile phone is production house and canvas, display, gallery, or viewing room, is what makes the medium the most exciting to aficionados of technological and social innovation such as the renowned technorati and Stanford Prof Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.
"Consider that the phone is now also a still and video camera," Rheingold mused on the artistic potential of mobiles, "with the power to publish directly to the internet, and that the phone and iPod now are ways to access published text, audio, still images, and video - how could this not signal and enable a broadening of artistic expression?"
It's a view shared locally by Jessie Ward of the mobile film channel Wildlight.ie. "Every phone now comes with a camera and it means everybody has access to photography. Definitely there's something about the way phone cameras are used that makes you change your perspective."
Nicky Gogan, president of Wildlight, echoes this. "The medium has moved on from its early interactive days when software writers were prominent, though there's still some work going on in generative animations, and it's becoming a medium for artists working with moving images."
Wildlight currently offers 10 mobile movies at any time on a service delivered to Vodafone customers and won the award for Best Mobile Content at the Irish Digital Media Awards in February. Meanwhile, mobile phone giant Nokia, which last year signed an agreement to use Zeiss optics in its camera lenses, is now in the third year of its mobile shorts competition.
Charles Traub, a noted photographer and director of photography at the New York School of Visual Arts, believes the small camera in the mobile phone facilitates a new visual language and this is what makes mobile phones a viable medium for artists.
"There's no question it's a viable artistic medium. The phone is ubiquitous. Just put it in the hands of a creative person and things will happen. The question is it viable is a non-question."
Nokia supports mobile phone art from known and established artists and from newcomers, through its connect-to-art programme. Nokia's exhibitions show varied creativity. Though they include the to-be-expected bleak urban landscape and alienated youth, they also incorporate original still life portraits and colourful abstracts from Nam June Paik, quirky surreal portraits from William Wegmans, and other images that defy easy categorisation.
For theorists such as Traub it is the point-and-shoot capability and the ubiquity of the phone camera that matters, something Ward agrees with. The phone camera brings photography to people that may not previously have picked up a camera.
The fact that the untutored now take and display photographs (on sites such as flickr.com) as well as films can be met with a ritual response. Yes it's democratising but the general public don't really do art, do they?
In fact, something quite different seems to be happening. Ward explains: "At the Rotterdam Film Festival recently, the organisers hosted a competition called the One Take Competition. And it was just that. Established filmmakers were asked to make a movie with a Nokia N90 mobile, and they had no access to editing or retakes. It was fascinating and took you back to what films are about."
In other words, rather than present the general user as a novice without the necessary visual grammar to make films, the Rotterdam organisers forced film-makers to shed their established visual structures. That might be regarded as the real democratising power of this medium.
The limitations of mobile phone cameras create a new visual language. "Any new optical device brings a new perspective to how we see," explains Traub and points to the early box cameras, SLRs and the first digital cameras as having had the scale of impact we can expect to see from mobiles. "The ability to point and shoot allows us to get up real close and anonymously," says Traub. "It can change our point of view."
The intimate and sometimes anonymous aspects of photography that the digital revolution unleashed can sometimes sit uneasily even with traditionally liberal interpretations of art. The Digital Diaries, Natacha Merrit's photographic record of her sex life is a case in point of boundaries broken once they could be.
Traub, however, points to the collaborative or connected use of phone cameras as a possible source of the visual and historical impact of mobile phones.
"I'm not sure that any one artist has emerged to become the genius of the mobile phone, nor will one," says Traub, who is organising an exhibition of mobile phone art in New York City. "People are only just getting it [mobile phone and art]. But with the cell phone what you have is everyone being observant. The real issue is collective observation so what you're going to see will be a remarkable new insight into our lives, into the family, for example, from all these people. Perhaps in future the artist will be the organiser, the one who brings this together."
Something of that collective observation has already been the subject of one exhibition, held last year in Nottingham in the UK. Something Less Than A Terrible Nightmare used photographs taken by members of the public, with mobile phones, to create an eerie account of city life.
But it is also the intimacy of being able to shoot pictures in an unobtrusive way with no access to focus and light adjustments that contributes to the emerging visual language of the phone. Digital cameras have broken down the barriers of what people are prepared to share. Phone cameras are popularising that intimacy on a wider scale. In the process the lines between artist and public are blurring as we discover a visual language that perhaps for the first time in history the majority of us - artist and non-artist, share.
Artistic expression goes mobile
- Wildlight is a new film channel, supported by the Irish Film Board, that delivers short films to mobile phones.
- Nokia sponsors Wildlight' s Darklight festival, which debuted in Dublin in 2005. This year's festival takes place in Temple Bar, Dublin, from June 22to 25. See also http://europe .nokia.com/nokia/0,,88120,00.html
- Nokia's Mobile shorts competition is at http://www.nokiashorts.com/flash.htm
- Pocket Shorts, which funds the production of films for mobile phones, debuted at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2004. See http://www.blinkmedia.org/blinkmedia/index.asp. The Rotterdam Film Festival initiated the One Take film-making with mobile phones this year. See www.cinema.nl/xtrasmall.
- The New York School of Visual Arts is planning a major exhibition of art made on mobile phones. Curated by Charles Traub among others, it will be an open invitation to artists, with no criteria for inclusion or exclusion. The exhibition will "take the pulse" of current artistic creativity. See www.sva.edu
- To view early interactive work, see http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/designing/FLIRT/FLIRT.html
- For short films see http://www.wildlight.tv/ and http://www.darklight.ie/
- To see Suspicious Nottingham, see http:// www.bbc.co.uk:80/nottingham/ content/image_galleries/suspicious_notts_mobile_phone_art_gallery.shtml?2
