1000 Cell Phones
1000 Cell Phones is a two-part collaborative mobile media installation focused on the meaning of cultural exchange and the nature of social networking within everyday public environments. Installed in two major world cities during 2008 (June 2008, Beijing September 2008, New York City) and created by artists in both locations, 1000 Cell Phones defies us to face reality; there is no real cultural exchange through capital and institutions, only attempts at control and manipulation. Fundamentally, we already live in a global world, and dividing it into “east” and “west” is an arbitrary distinction. Vital art operates outside of these boundaries.
1000 Cell Phones [Push]:
Visitors to the Synthetic Times 2008 exhibition at the National Art Museum of China are sent strange and mysterious images directly to their mobile devices. The meaning and origin of the images is uncertain. Some of the images contain obvious references to western brands and icons, while others are less clear: head shots of Caucasian strangers, odd objects, smashed cars, street signs from foreign cities, symbols and text in English. Months after the close of the Beijing
show, New Yorkers walking down lower Fifth Avenue receive the same treatment; they are sent images to their phones, foreign in nature, surprising and puzzling. Chinese text and icons, Asian brands, portraits of people and things, pictures from far away appear on their miniature but private displays. It is not clear where the images come from, and there is no ability to respond.
1000 Cell Phones [Pull]:
Upon entering the CAFÉ at the National Art Museum of China during the Synthetic Times 2008 exhibition, weary gallery-goers are witness to a triptych of large data monitors, representing all recent Bluetooth enabled mobile devices present at the museum. The screens, each with its own visual language, represent an hourly, daily, and weekly archive of unique mobile phone hardware ID numbers recorded as they enter the museum. These time scales and visual iconography evoke the
central themes of the Synthetic Times 2008 exhibition: the expressive nature of the human body beyond mere visuality, the intrinsic qualities of digital media as emotive and autonomous agents, the multivalent recombinant quality of data clouds and the rhizomatic hyper-connectedness
of telephony and computational networks.
Artists: David Carroll, Benjamin Bacon, Sven Travis, Haiyan Huang.
Exhibitions:
Synthetic Times, National Art Museum of China, Beijing China, June
2008
