I found out about this great exhibition last week. Us being a mobile app company, we couldn’t be happier to feature a new exhibition premiering in Berlin based on mobility and tracing location. Several well-known artists are taking part like Aram Bartholl and Simon Faithfull. We decide to find out a little more from Miles Chalcraft one of the curators. Make sure you check out this exhibition taking place at HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT before it ends on the 12th of December.
1.What’s the short history behind this exhibition? How did it come together?
The exhibition has evolved from a previous concept for an exhibition which looked at how the wireless city is evolving and how artists are interacting with it. With this came the idea that wireless networks provided new meta architectural spaces within an urban environment that individuals were exploiting for various and profitable reasons. For example, someone might be running a record company from their laptop and a server where their office is a local café with wireless internet access. This raised the question of whether the wireless urban environment then changes the physical architecture of the city – i.e if SMEs are working from cafes or wherever a wireless point presents itself, then do you need to build offices or hot desking facilities and what else would flow into the void left by them.
These wireless networks then provide new work spaces, become new economic zones and new cultural zones. If we move city or to another country we can still access these spaces and so in a sense we carry them on our backs like nomads. There begins the discussion of mobility and migration. Data trails are a fact of modern life as the proliferation of mobile and wireless networks increases. If we carry these spaces on our backs like nomads, then we increasingly also establish new perimeters as we travel around. These trails themselves are forms of electronic space and can be mapped (Heath Bunting).
Having worked with Heath Bunting in 2007, exhibiting one of the first iterations of the Status Project, it became clear to us that increasingly artists were excited about exposing the surveillance culture and data mining industry, and Heath’s Status project provided a visualisation for the process which was a map that could be overlaid over a city and so represented real space. We went in search of further examples of this and so was born Tracing Mobility. Heath’s Status project provides the basis for thinking about the exhibition and as such is also written large on the floor of the Austellungshalles.
2.”Mobility has become one of the most important keywords in dominant discourses on globalisation, techno-economic change and the Information Society. The idea of nomadic, ‘mobile’ persons supported by spatial mobilisation of capital, goods and knowledge pervades politics, economics, technology, media, commerce and culture.”
We couldn’t agree more, we ourselves are a cutting edge location based mobile app. Is this really the future? Can the public catch up to all this mobility mayhem? are they ready for it?
The public are more than ready for it, now that it has been app’ified. Location based technologies, mobile technologies etc have been around for a long time but it wasn’t until the advent of the iPhone that it left the hands of the Road Warrior and entered the mainstream. The problem is they don’t know or don’t care about the Faustian pact they are making with the data mining industry. Increasingly the infrastructure for Orwell’s 1984 is being built. Individuals have to be educated to care about their data rights.
