The Construction of New Subjectivities in the Era of the Mobile Phone
Read Miya Yoshida's Ph.D. dissertation here.
Sunday, 27 January 2008
Mobile Gleaning
A three week undergraduate course offered by the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design, to investigate urban mobile culture and experience in contemporary Stockholm via the use of mobile phones in public spaces.
The mobile phone is today omnipresent, used not only for direct verbal communication but also as notebook, still camera, audio recorder, photo album, music storage device, texting interface, blog updater, miniaturised laptop, and, increasingly, video camera. What is the untapped potential of the technology itself? What impact does this portable multi-function device have on how we interact with our surroundings? How does does it delimit contemporary urban culture?
The contemporary urban commuter, the flaneur or flaneuse, not only observes fragments of urban life, but recontextualises such fragments. She walks equipped with a powerful device for a range of documentation, ready to gather, accumulate and immediately forward snapshots of her daily experience.
How are these fragments re-combined to create a broader context of communication and connectivity? How does such ”mobile gleaning” play out the centrality of interpretation in our interaction with our everyday urban surroundings?
Course contents and organisation:
The course spans three weeks. These are divided into three topical units:
1. Mobile
Mobile urban culture and the specific features of the mobile phone
2. Gleaning
The flaneur/flaneuse’s experience of her contemporary surroundings and the gathering of transitory impressions
3. Mobile Gleaning
The intentional gathering of observations and impressions as fragmentary documents; questions of coherence, context, interpretation and illegibility.
Each unit comprises lectures, discussions, film-screenings and studio work where the students will explore the role of the mobile phone in contemporary cultural experience by practically employing mobile phones in their work. As a final task, the students will be invited to gather short observations on a specified theme. They thus collectively produce speculative documentation concerning an imagined event which (in the absence of mainstream media coverage) is then edited into a narrative account of the enigmatic occurence, proposing interpretations and forms of witness testimonies to conditions of profound uncertainty.
Teachers:
Tanja v. Dahlern, M.A.,
Background in documentary film and alternative media.
Rolf Hughes, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Design Theory and Practice-Based Research
Research through Practice/Experience Design Group
Dept. Of Interdisciplinary Studies
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
The mobile phone is today omnipresent, used not only for direct verbal communication but also as notebook, still camera, audio recorder, photo album, music storage device, texting interface, blog updater, miniaturised laptop, and, increasingly, video camera. What is the untapped potential of the technology itself? What impact does this portable multi-function device have on how we interact with our surroundings? How does does it delimit contemporary urban culture?
The contemporary urban commuter, the flaneur or flaneuse, not only observes fragments of urban life, but recontextualises such fragments. She walks equipped with a powerful device for a range of documentation, ready to gather, accumulate and immediately forward snapshots of her daily experience.
How are these fragments re-combined to create a broader context of communication and connectivity? How does such ”mobile gleaning” play out the centrality of interpretation in our interaction with our everyday urban surroundings?
Course contents and organisation:
The course spans three weeks. These are divided into three topical units:
1. Mobile
Mobile urban culture and the specific features of the mobile phone
2. Gleaning
The flaneur/flaneuse’s experience of her contemporary surroundings and the gathering of transitory impressions
3. Mobile Gleaning
The intentional gathering of observations and impressions as fragmentary documents; questions of coherence, context, interpretation and illegibility.
Each unit comprises lectures, discussions, film-screenings and studio work where the students will explore the role of the mobile phone in contemporary cultural experience by practically employing mobile phones in their work. As a final task, the students will be invited to gather short observations on a specified theme. They thus collectively produce speculative documentation concerning an imagined event which (in the absence of mainstream media coverage) is then edited into a narrative account of the enigmatic occurence, proposing interpretations and forms of witness testimonies to conditions of profound uncertainty.
Teachers:
Tanja v. Dahlern, M.A.,
Background in documentary film and alternative media.
Rolf Hughes, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Design Theory and Practice-Based Research
Research through Practice/Experience Design Group
Dept. Of Interdisciplinary Studies
Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design
Gleaning (acc. to Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary)
The corners of fields were not to be reaped, and the sheaf accidentally left behind was not to be fetched away, according to the law of Moses (Lev. 19:9; 23:22; Deut. 24:21).
They were to be left for the poor to glean. Similar laws were given regarding vineyards and oliveyards. (Comp. Ruth 2:2.)
They were to be left for the poor to glean. Similar laws were given regarding vineyards and oliveyards. (Comp. Ruth 2:2.)
Bertolt Brecht, "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication"
In our society, one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to [...] justify their existence [...] Thus there was a moment when technology was advanced enough to produce the radio and society was not yet advanced enough to accept it. The radio was then in its first phase of being a substitute: a substitute for theater, opera, concerts, lectures, café music, local newspapers, and so forth. This was the patient’s period of halcyon youth. I am not sure if it’s finished yet, but if so then this stripling who needed to certificate of competence to be born will have to start looking restrospectively for an object in life.
The Metropolis and Mental Life by Georg Simmel
adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New
York: Free Press, 1950, pp.409-424
Recommended reading from Tania.
York: Free Press, 1950, pp.409-424
Recommended reading from Tania.
Monday, 10 December 2007
Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper
ABSTRACT
Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper
Kinga Araya, Ph.D.
Concordia University, 2004
This thesis investigates two art performances involving walking in the city that are conceptualized as exilic works of art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Vehicle performed in 1973 in Warsaw; and Adrian Piper’s Catalysis performed from 1970 to 1971 in New York. My contention is that Wodiczko’s and Piper’s walks in the city can be examined by applying a threefold understanding of exile. First, these important performative artworks made manifest in the form of artistic walks are marginalized within, or exiled from, an institutionalized mainstream art. Second, the artists themselves communicate either personal or metaphorical states of exile. Third, the phenomena of contemporary metropolises, as diverse as the communist Warsaw and the capitalist New York of the 1970s are analyzed as alienating and exilic social dwellings par excellence in which most of the inhabitants do not feel “at home”.
This paper also summarizes a much longer and more intense conflation of my personal and professional experience with walking. I, myself, am an exile, who literally walked away from a student trip in Florence, Italy. Since that crucial event, I have developed a very special relationship with walking, this most humble human activity that I no longer take for granted. In order to make my writing more conversational I traveled to Poland and the United States to walk the same streets that Wodiczko and Piper walked during their performances with my photo and video cameras. My visual and textual re-tracing of the artists’ steps form a creative part of this dissertation. Since I wanted to exhaust the richness of these two exilic art works and to connect them to the contemporary urban experience, I employ my personal writing style and juxtapose it with the photographs I took in Warsaw and New York. These creative reflections on walking that enrich the academic form of expression are enclosed in two attachments following the chapters in which I theoretically analyze Wodiczko’s and Piper’s walking performance artworks.
More.
Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper
Kinga Araya, Ph.D.
Concordia University, 2004
This thesis investigates two art performances involving walking in the city that are conceptualized as exilic works of art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Vehicle performed in 1973 in Warsaw; and Adrian Piper’s Catalysis performed from 1970 to 1971 in New York. My contention is that Wodiczko’s and Piper’s walks in the city can be examined by applying a threefold understanding of exile. First, these important performative artworks made manifest in the form of artistic walks are marginalized within, or exiled from, an institutionalized mainstream art. Second, the artists themselves communicate either personal or metaphorical states of exile. Third, the phenomena of contemporary metropolises, as diverse as the communist Warsaw and the capitalist New York of the 1970s are analyzed as alienating and exilic social dwellings par excellence in which most of the inhabitants do not feel “at home”.
This paper also summarizes a much longer and more intense conflation of my personal and professional experience with walking. I, myself, am an exile, who literally walked away from a student trip in Florence, Italy. Since that crucial event, I have developed a very special relationship with walking, this most humble human activity that I no longer take for granted. In order to make my writing more conversational I traveled to Poland and the United States to walk the same streets that Wodiczko and Piper walked during their performances with my photo and video cameras. My visual and textual re-tracing of the artists’ steps form a creative part of this dissertation. Since I wanted to exhaust the richness of these two exilic art works and to connect them to the contemporary urban experience, I employ my personal writing style and juxtapose it with the photographs I took in Warsaw and New York. These creative reflections on walking that enrich the academic form of expression are enclosed in two attachments following the chapters in which I theoretically analyze Wodiczko’s and Piper’s walking performance artworks.
More.
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