New Directions in Mobile Media and Performance

Camille C. Baker, Camille Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472467188
• eBook ISBN: 9781317088530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

New Directions in Mobile Media and Performance explores various performative projects and forms of expression that have emerged since the onset of the smartphone. It focuses mainly on new concepts and developments that have emerged in mobile media performance. It showcases the intimate and phenomenological mobile aesthetic that has been unfolding within networked performance and media art projects for over a decade and a half. This aesthetic utilises the potential and affordances with each iteration and update of modern smartphones.

Themes of embodiment, presence, liveness and connection through mobile, networked, and remote technology are revisited in the context of HD mobile cameras, selfies and live video streaming from the phone, as well as the impact of peer production, opensource and Maker culture on mobile media performance practices. It explores the surge in development of wearable devices in performance, as well as how the 'quantified-self movement' has affected performance works. It deals with concepts and developments in intermedial performance that incorporate mobile and wearable devices, especially from the artist's, designer's or dramaturge's perspective as the creator and their creative process, working with technology as a collaborator, not just a tool or guide.

The book demonstrates how artists have repurposed the device – transforming it from merely a communication device, using voice and text only – to become a new collaborative medium, a full visual, synaesthetic, interactive and performative tool of deeper expression and social change. It discusses seminal works and the evolution of the medium, within intermedial digital art and performance practices as medium for artistic expression, creative process and staged performances. It focuses on projects and artists who have pushed mobile media performance beyond the conventional blackbox. Emerging visual, digital, interactive, tactile, gestural and theatrical or performance projects that incorporate mobile or wearable devices, used as vehicles for more challenging, experimental, experiential and immersive performative artworks are highlighted.

The book also contextualises Baker's own media research and performance practice within the larger landscape with the field. It is bookended with interviews with the artists themselves on their creative process and intentions.

It is the outcome of three years of research of artistic works around the world, interviews, in-person viewings of performances, as well as incorporating and reflecting on her own ongoing practice and projects in context.

Part I

Mobile media affordances

Theoretical foundations

To frame the book, we start with the theoretical underpinnings of mobile performance, with focus on embodiment of technology and the role it now plays in our lives, which is contextualised through performance. Mobile performance differs from intermediality, as Robin Nelson states in the introductory chapter of the book Mapping Intermediality (2010), as it is ‘best understood in relation to performance, and specifically through a dialogic engagement with instances of practice’, as defined by Jensen, who also says, ‘As means of expression and exchange, the different media depend on and refer to each other . . . they interact as elements of particular communicative’ (Nelson in Bay-Cheng etal. 2010: 15 from Donsbach 2008).

Mobile performance has become increasingly key in the technology of intermedial performance, though it is more specific to portable devices and does not include the wide range of tools and technologies that can be employed in intermedial performance. This part focuses on the experience and theories of mobile use, and creative implementation within various forms and styles of performance. We will revisit themes previously discussed elsewhere, but with implications for and application to performance works. Specific focus is on how mobile devices have inserted themselves into our lives, on our relationship to and with them and with each other.

There can be no question that the mobile phone is now considered a part of us now. Everyday people experience anxiety and stress when without their phones or after the battery runs out – it is like temporarily losing the use of a limb, or part of our mind. This section focuses on that intimate experience of the mobile device in our lives and how it registers in the body and mind. We start with the affordances of intimacy with the mobile phone and of connectivity through networks, then move into liveness and presence online, ending with discussions on embodiment as it relates to technology. We will discuss the development of new affordances of mobile technologies, particularly through mobile app development, and the changing of art and performance practices in response.

An affordance can be said to be a feature or aspect or quality of an object, structure or environment that enables its users to perform an action or do something more easily. The perceptual psychologist James Gibson first coined the term affordance in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986). He claimed it as a possible action within an individual’s immediate environment, available regardless of that person’s ability to see or utilise this possibility. Donald Norman brought the term into the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in 1988 in his book The Design of Everyday Things:

the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [. . .] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.

(Norman 1988: 9)

Since the release of the iPhone in 2006, the interface and usability design for most smartphones have come packaged with the ability to have numerous applications or ‘apps’ and for the user to add an infinite number of additional apps from an online app store. The user can use the built-in tools/hardware developed for the phone, such as Internet access, telephone access, cameras for phones and video in the front and sometimes back, audio recording for voice messages, GPS for mapping, more recently an accelerometer and gyroscope for wearable and health apps, Siri/AI interaction touch screen interface, and more. Now at the intersection of design, media and art there are built-in capabilities for the use of specific apps¹ that also enable creative production. This includes filmmaking and editing, audio recording, mixing and performing live, painting tools for drawing and painting digital fine art works, not to mention more sophisticated, semi-professional photography, as well as coding tools for artists and programmers. Some of the uses for these tools are utilised more than others and some are used more efficiently than others in mobile performance productions.

Martin Reiser’s The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, is an edited series of essays focused on the mobile phone in locative media and psychogeography projects and location-based audience interaction projects, with specific emphasis on how artists have been trying to enhance and enable deeper participation in digital artworks. Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot’s chapter, ‘Towards a Language of Mobile Media’ (2011: 101–5) includes the following as the primary axes of experience for users of mobile (locative) media projects:

1) Immersion: Surface < > Depth/Information < > Evocation;

2) User Control: None < > Total;

3) Rules: Clear < > Unclear;

4) Space/Place: Arbitrary Mapping < > Meaningful Mapping;

5) Dimensions of Space: Linearity < > Non-linearity;

6) Time: Fixed < > Open Running Time;

7) Time: Specific < > Unspecific;

8) Installation: Permanent < > One-off;

9) Data Depth: One Level < > Several Levels of Data;

10) Social: Private < > Public/Solitary < > Shared < > Collaborative;

11) Production Expertise: Pro < > Amateur;

12) Experience: Augmented < > New Stand Alone.

These are productive categories for understanding user experience of geolocative, psychogeographic media projects, which they were designed for, and some of these may in fact apply to many projects discussed here, especially 1, 6, 7 and 9 above. Yet the focus here is on the creative intentions and processes of the designers/artists, particularly with intermedial or immersive theatre, dance, circus, live art, music or other modes of performance.

Dovey and Fleuriot add to this by saying, ‘Mobile or locative media are situated or located in particular space and places’ and ‘Mobile media content is controlled by movement through physical space i.e. not by gestural movement of the body’ (2011: 105). This is an important distinction as it underlines the point that even though mobile devices are small, intimate and not taking up much actual space, they indeed use and are controlled by the movement through space via the user, and are situated, and thus exist and occupy space in a unique way like no other technology. Dovey and Fleuriot later add, deep ‘experiences in which the media evade affective responses where the physical environment decreases in significance’ (2011: 106), which is to say that the activities taking place on the mobile device consume the attention of the user to the degree that one could say that the user becomes ‘sucked’ into the phone² and the space and activities of the space outside the device no longer exist, temporarily, for the user. This is a curious reversal of occupying space that speaks to the later discussion on how one can embody technology, and in this sense quite literally embodies it to the point where the user loses awareness of their surrounding physical space. The authors assert that ‘Mobile media need to have hooks, which draw the user into the experience in a pleasurable way’ (2011: 106), which is what all app developers strive to do – pull the user’s consciousness into the phone.

Mobile media aesthetic affordances

The mobile phone, since its rise to widespread use in the late 1900s and early 2000s, became beloved for its innate encouragement of spontaneity, and the speed of thought. It enables the rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas and emotion, flashes and clashes of images, as well as the ability to layer meaning and stream of consciousness, possible not only in text messaging, but also in photos, video, social media and audio tools. For those using this evolving moving-image medium, the aesthetic of mobile video, as with the early film or video cameras, has advanced radically from the imperfect pixelated image to high-resolution precision and image quality. However, today’s mobile video is still not quite HD broadcast quality³ (though that does not stop news broadcasters from using poor quality crowd-sourced video), with its compression artefacts, necessary for mobile streaming, but each new model is steadily improved with better cameras and advanced compression algorithms. Still, we value the experience of immediacy as a form of empowerment through the accessibility of the device – the pixelated and compressed resolution, especially, or the early mobile video artist, held its own beauty and power. And due to its portability and close relationship to the body, mobile video has always been associated with an inherent embodied expressivity.

Since the arrival of the iPhone, a number of publications have investigated the mobile from different sociological, cultural and economic angles,⁴ as well as the technical and programming texts, or interface design (Jones 2006 among others). Few have dealt with the creative practice and the multidisciplinary field of mobile media art, although this has been changing in recent years.⁵ The focus has been instead on mobile cinema, photography or mobile locative media games primarily, as discussed by Berry and Schleser (2014), Reiser (2011) and Benford via the Nottingham University Pervasive Media Lab. Jason Farman’s edited book The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies includes authors who touch on the creative dimension of mobile media through the dimension of storytelling and how it is enabled by the mobile phone. In Farman’s monograph Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media however, his focus is more on the interface and how it enables the experience of embodiment and phenomenological experience, a topic touched on in the upcoming chapters in Part I.

Nowadays, the affordances of the mobile phone have significantly changed film, photography, digital painting and games industries, and considerably increased amateur creativity, as well as changed how audiences engage with these practices.⁶ What is of interest here is how mobile media differs from more established forms of media as a creative making tool, as a social interaction tool, as a performative guide, and as a performer or collaborator itself. Specific qualities afforded by mobile devices, such as immediacy and intimacy, continue to be explored with an emphasis on mobile video art, participatory performance, interactive art, performance art, dance, circus, music or immersive theatre.

The prevalent notion of mobile media involves images, sound or videos created by, existing on, or received through mobile phones or other wearable or portable devices,⁷ which have become essential, affective and intimate companions that have insinuated themselves in our everyday lives (Christensen 2006). However, the intimate mobile aesthetic⁸ has now developed into full-length films for mobile film festivals, mobile documentary, ‘professional’ mobile photography and mobile painting. It has also evolved into mobile news and entertainment channels on YouTube, and Vimeo and mobile interactive art, as well as mobile immersive theatre, which utilises the full range afforded and expected of the modern smartphone. This aesthetic has transformed and reconfigured the device from merely a voice and text message communication tool, into a collaborative medium for artistic and personal expression. Miss Pixels stated (TEDxUdeM, 2012),⁹ that mobile media has ‘enabled exponential creativity not seen before’, although it is still not as prevalent a performance medium as anticipated in 2007, when I started my practice-based PhD on mobile performance.

By enabling ordinary people to become artists, the use of mobile media inverted what is considered ‘quality’ image construction or filmmaking:¹⁰ the limitations of the tool and pixelated resolution became an asset, rather than a hindrance to image-making. The tension of the poor image quality (created by the compression and image artefacts) imparted a rawness to the video’s medium and authenticity, a sense of ‘realness’ or ‘liveness’ making it seem more personal.¹¹ This sense of authenticity mirrors the way that a live music concert becomes a unique, authentic experience when the musicians play the ‘wrong’ key, play faster than the recorded version or have audio issues in front of the audience. In real-time it is not corrected or perfected, but heard exactly as it has happened. This adds to a concert’s uniqueness and ephemeral quality, distinguishing it from any other, and making it feel special to the observer who has co-experienced that moment.

Steve Hawley (2004) suggested that the mobile phone, with its blurry, imperfect resolution, pixilated/compressed quality and small aspect ratio, is in some ways, more ‘real’,¹² since everyone has access to the medium and can learn it easily, resulting in more imperfect but more personally meaningful images. More importantly, he suggested that it captures ‘what I am doing now, in this moment’, and has a personal immediacy that the imperfection of the image actually authenticates, through its lack of production values, or high-resolution, clean editing, and large aspect ratios. It is a more inti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• New Directions in Mobile Media and Performance
• Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Mobile Media Affordances
• Part II Mobile Performance: Evolving Practices
• Part III Artist Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index