Dimensions of mobile media design

I’ve been trying to find time to read Martin Reisers excellent book “The Mobile Audience” and hope to be able to post a full review of the book later this spring. One chapter in the book by Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot is however so practically useful that I wanted to devote a separate post to it.  The chapter is called “Towards a Language fo Mobile Media”.

What Dovey and Fleuriot do in the chapter is develop what they call “descriptive dimensions of mobile media design”. The list is an immensely useful checklist for anyone planning on creating any kind of interactive mobile media art with an emphasis on location and mixed realities.

I have tried to recreate the list in a compact form below, for a more complete reading, please refer to the book!

Dimension	From	To	Explanation
Immersion
	Information	Evocation	Does the experience inform or evoke emotions?
User control
	None	Total	Does the user control navigation through the experience?
	Clear rules	Unclear rules	Does the user control navigation through the experience?
Space/place mapping
	Arbitrary	Meaningful	Is content related to the user’s physical surroundings or disconnected from it?
Space
	Linearity	Non linearity	Can the user explore the experience or only move along a predefined path?
Time
	Fixed running	Open running	Does the experience have an internal timeline?
	Specific	Unspecific	Is the experience bound to a certain time (time of day, season, time of year)?
	Permanent	One-off	How long will the experience be available to visitors?
Depth of data
	One level	Several levels	Are there several layers of data, eg like “worlds” in games or is everything accessible at once?
Social
	Private	Public	Is the experience personal or is it open to be seen by a wider audience?
	Solitary	Collaborative	Do users see the same or separate media, can they interact in relation to the same media?
Producer expertise
	Professional	Amateur	Does content appear “produced” or does it look authentic as if created by “real people”?
Relation to environment
	Augmentation	New experience	Is the experience bound to the location or new and separate?

 

Once you have been able to decide on all the above aspects of any immersive/locative media work that you might be planning, you already have a very good idea of what it it that you are going to produce.

Paint like Jackson Pollock, on your mobile!

Paint like Jackson Pollock on you iPhone

Jackson Pollock was one of the pivotal US abstract painters of the mid 20th century. We all recognize his drips when we see them.

The Life magazine website just put up some previously unpublished photos of Jackson Pollock on their website. In particular the pictures showing Pollock at work made me think of one the more interesting art web sites and art application on the web, jacksonpollock.org. The site is the work of Miltos Manetas.

Not only is jacksonpollock.org a website, they also have an iPhone application.

Using the site and the application you can be the Jackson Pollock of your own life and create dripping artworks to fulfil your artistic taste. Below are a couple of pictures from Life showing Pollock at work. Now get your phone or pc out and create your own drip style!

Jackson Polloc at work Time/Life blog

 



Jackson Pollock at work Time/Life blog

Tokyo: fusion of art and technology – also on your mobile

I had the good fortune to spend a highly interesting week in Tokyo, touring a number of high-tech companies together with a group of PhD students from the Aalto University.

On a general level, it was quite interesting to experience how unproblematic the japanese relation to technology was. This was in particular evident from the onslaught of all kinds of robots that we saw. The japanese clearly had less of a concern of the potentially “dehumanizing” effect of robots on society than us (mostly westerners).

An other observation was the penetration of mobile into japanese life. On the metro, there was hardly anyone below 50 that did not fondle a mobile phone while travelling. Speaking on the phone in public was mostly forbidden so people interacted with applications and services.

Unfortunately, sights and museums in Tokyo close very early, so I did not get much of a chance to check out the Tokyo art scene. We did however have time for a brief visit to the NTT ICC Inter Communication Center. Here we had a chance to see a couple of exhibitions fusing art and technology in very interesting ways. If you are in Tokyo or planning a visit, check out the art scene from Tokyo Art Beat! 

And for the real mobile connoisseur, there is of course a mobile application to find those top art events and even get special deals on the entry tickets. For events information, get the Tokyo Art Beat app for the iPhone and for Android. For the special deals, get the MuPon (Mobile Cupon?) app for the iPhone.

s[edition] – top branded artists on your mobile!

Did you ever dream of owning works by Damien Hirst (yes, the guy with the bling-bling skulls), Tracey Emin (recently appointed professor – of drawing! – at the Royal Academy) or Isaac Julien (who’s video works have been featured even here in remote Helsinki)? Thought you could not afford them?

Think again. There is a new kid on the block, and the new kid is called s[edition]. s[edition] is an on-line art gallery selling digital art from some of today’s top (commercial) names in art. And you can have your Hirst for as little as €9 and your Emin for a mere €60!

So what is the catch? There is not catch, really, but the works are digital and intended to be displayed on your smartphone, pad or PC. And because they are digital, they are sold in series of several thousand.

If you purchase a work (s[edition] calls them Editions) you get the digital copy, become listed on the site as a Collector and receive a Certificate of Authenticity, which includes the Edition number of your purchase, the name of the Artwork, the Artist’s name and the your name. All is stored in the Vault, the s[edition] term for you Collector’s account. Just like the real (well, physical) thing.

So if owning some übercool digital art is your thing, head over to s[edition] and get your piece of the action.

Mobile mobile season's greeting by James Théophane

Xmas is just a few rushed working days away; seems it always comes as a surprise, doesn’t it?

While preparing to go off-the-air for some cleaning in the house and other festive stuff, the 3 Inch Canvas wants to bring our readers a little Xmas spirit by way of a wonderful installation work created by James Théophane.

And yes, as you can see perhaps glean from the schematic to the left, there was not a spelling mistake in the header of this post. The work is a mobile (you know the kind of moving piece that hangs from the ceiling) created using mobile phones.

Feel the Xmas magic by way of a video of the installation. To find out more on the work and the artist, head over to James’ web page here!

The 3 Inch Canvas wishes all our readers a peaceful holiday season and all the best for 2012. Hope to see you back here next year. We do have some goodies lined up so stay tuned!

Sounds for your mobile art application

The 3 Inch Canvas is by no means a music site and we do not pretend to have any competences in the area of anything audible. However, there are some really cool dudes over at the Aalto School of Electrical Engineering that know tons about all kinds of audio stuff. This year’s version of their courses related to Audio Signal Processing concentrated on something highly relevant, that is implementing audio features on application for mobiles. Cool, no?

The results of the course were presented in a seminar lat Friday. If you are interested in all things audio, then worry not! All the seminar papers can be download from this location! What do you say about stuff like “Audio-driven mobile music applications: a design perspective” by R. Pugliese or “Mobile Music in Performance Context” by C.-H. Lai? Sure sounds interesting to me!

Check it out!

Art, censorship, mobile phones and QR codes

Point your mobile phone here to try it out!

Picked up an interesting story over on CBC.

Photographer Jeff Crawford submitted a semi-nude photograph to an art exhibition at the Fredericton city hall, New Brunswick, Canada. The photo was rejected and Crawford was asked to submit something less controversial.

Crawford ended up submitting a QR code instead. The QR code is a way of coding information that most smartphones can understand (or there is an app for that). The code can contain for instance a web link and is read using the phone’s camera.

This is exactly what the QR code submitted by Crawford contained: a link to the original, refused work of art. Anyone with a smartphone with QR-code support and an Internet connection could just point their phone at the code and be directed to Crawford’s gallery on the net.

While I hope that most artists do not have their work censored, this is also a nice reminder that QR-codes can be used by to supplement works in exhibitions or to provide a way for users of smartphones to easily connect with you or access your works on-line.

QR-codes can be printed or shown on a screen, so you can use them in posters, on websites, on T-shirts, pretty much anywhere where people can come within a few inches of the code.

Getting your own QR code is easy as 1-2-3. There are a lot of online sites where you can generate and download your own code. Two examples here or here! Guess where the QR code above leads?

And you can make up your own mind on whether censorship was required here at Crawford’s on-line gallery.

Put an art gallery in your pocket!

Anthony Antonellis exhibition on the WAG

The 3 Inch Canvas’ summer break ended up being a bit on the long side. But we are back now, happy to see you here.

While we were nearly comatose (well, not quite, stay tuned for some interesting stuff coming shortly), some other artists were fortunately active!

One of the most interesting mobile art scene events of late has been created by Chiara Passa from Italy. We already noted her mobile sculptures here, but now Chiara has upped the game.

What Chiara has created is a 3-dimensional, single room gallery that fits into your pocket. Or more accurately, on your smartphone screen. Chiara calls the gallery WAG (short for Widget Art Gallery). Forget the slightly geekish name, what the WAG is, is an actually an almost tangible gallery with various visiting artist exhibiting their works.

Sounds cool? Definitely! Does it work? Absolutely! 

As of the time of writing, WAG is featuring “One and Four” by Anthony Antonellis. Chiara calls the work “a site specific gif installation made for the Widget Art Gallery“. The installation consists of a looped three 10-second animations.

While WAG has been designed with the iPhone in mind, it seems to work also on Windows Phone 7.5. For Android, I only had 2.2 to test with and there it did not work. If anybody tests on a newer version of Android, do let us know the result of your tests.

Interested? If you want to see the exhibition and own a compatible device, just head over to the WAG gallery at http://www.chiarapassa.it/wag/mobile/. WAG is also available on iPad. If you have a pad, WAG is best seen at http://www.chiarapassa.it/wagipad/mobile/.

If you are an artist, that would like to try out the WAG, suggest you send an email to Chiara. Contact and other info can be found on Chiara’s site once you have figured out the white-on-white riddle.

Can’t wait to see what Chiara comes up with next!

Connective Corridors, be mobile between museums and events

At least if you live in Finland, you must have noticed the “cultural city” fever that has taken Finland by storm. This year the city of Turku is one of two European capitals of culture (the other one is Tallinn just across the Gulf of Finland) and in 2012 Helsinki will be the World Design Capital.

Both “culture city” initiatives are highly events focused. With a lot of events and venues, the word “mobile” takes on a whole new meaning. Accessing the stuff by phone could be an option, but obviously you want to get to the events to really get the most out of them. Meaning you need to be “mobile”.

Even thought Finland has a very high penetration of cars, the city centers of both Turku and Helsinki are best travelled on foot or on a bus. One can only hope that public transport between events and venues is on the agendas of the two cities.

One model to provide visitor and inhabitant mobility alike are the Connective Corridor projects in the US. Personally I think the one in Syracuse, NY looks very nice as it focuses on culture and education. Great concept to copy to create personal mobility to art! And the bus looks great, doesn’t it!

And while waiting for cultural corridors: If you are in Helsinki and want to move easily between various places, the Helsinki Region Traffic has a very good mobile journey planner to find how to get from A to B using public transport. Bookmark it for your next visit to Helsinki!

Museums and mobile

Bringing mobiles into a museum is not something that only the 3 Inch Canvas does. There are  a number of museums that are active in developing services aimed at mobile devices for their visitors.

Nancy Procter, head of New Media initiatives at the Smithsonian Institute, is running an informational site about museums and mobile over at museummobile.info. This looks like an invaluable site to anyone working with issues related to spreading and deepening the relationship between art institutions of all kinds and their audiences.

Especially the site’s wiki has a wealth of information.

Nancy has also posted some of her insights as a slideshare presentation, which you can see here. If you think mobile phones are just a high tech way to give visitors an audio tour without the museum having to invest in the hardware devices, think again ;-)!

And if you want to experience mobile devices in a real museum setting in Helsinki, don’t forget to check out the Asphalt and sunflowers photo exhibition. There you can sample a much larger set of photos by accessing Aapo Rista’s mobile gallery application on a Nokia 900 while comfortably seated.