Installation by Gun Holmström
This is the second post discussing some of the learnings from the second 3 Inch Canvas exhibition, see the first post here.
One of the new things that we experimented with in the Jyväskylä exhibition was embedding mobile devices into something “larger”.
A great example of such embedding was Gun Holmström’s installation “Chants for mobile phones” (shown left). In this work, videos are displayed on mobile phones and form part of the installation. It’s an interesting example of how mobile phones enable artist to embed digital content into their works also on other scales than by just using big computer screens or TVs. Hanging a big TV on one of the animals would not have worked too well.
Embedding a mobile into an object, an installation or similar, enables the inanimate work to come alive and tell stories in totally new ways. In this exhibition we only used videos on the mobiles, but with programming the mobiles could be more interactive, possibly reacting to sounds, light and even movement.
An other example is Denise Zieglers work “Autobus” (video below). Here the benefits of the small dimensions of the mobile are even more obvious as the mobile device creates an animated video backdrop for a toy car (about 5 cm/2 inches high).
Based on the feedback from the artists, it seems that the exhibition acted as an eye-opener for some of the opportunities offered by mobile, just as we had hoped!
The 3 Inch Canvas 