MINA Mobile Creativity and Innovation Symposium

[Executive Suite – 5B 14]

Massey University, Wellington

Registration [$ 30 including lunch] http://bit.ly/2011MINA

10:30 Registration
11:00 am
Dr Camille Baker – MindTouch: Mobile Media Performance   [UK]
Kasia Molga – Saving the world with Twitter – musing on alternative ways of communications. Not necessary among humans.   [UK]
Dr Christopher Fry – Marking the possibilities: QR codes and new notions of space and place [UK]
Chair: Karen Curley

12:00 pm
Andrew Quitmeyer – Semi-Automatic Filmmaking with Mobile Devices [USA]
Laurent Antonczak  – Mobile Devices and Art Museum, a new learning experience [France]
Daniel Mauro – Speaking without Listening: Limitations of the Online Distribution and Accessibility of Amateur Video   [USA]
Chair: Roy Parkhurst

1 pm – 2pm Lunch Break

2 pm
Dean Keep and Marsha Berry – The Mobile Aesthetic: Exploiting the possibilities for Creative Practice
Roy Parkhurst – A small history of cinematography: Walter Benjamin and the tradition of the city portrait
Gavin Wilson – The Body as Physical Conduit for Experience in a Phenomenology of Cell Cinema
Chair: Dr. Max Schleser

3pm
Associate Professor Lynne Ciochetto – Cellphones and social services for the ‘bottom billion’
Tiago Franklin – The Brazilian Perspective on Mobile Art and Mobile Filmmaking [BRAZIL]
Daniel Wagner – Entertainment Lab for the Very Small Screen (ELVSS)

Chair: Antony Nevin
4pm
Rosângela Ap – “Mobile Art” – Mapping, Analysis and Classification of Poetic Proposal to use Cell Phones
Max Schleser – Mobile Filmmaking 2.0
Miss Pixels – I’m a serial creator – The Hashtag Project [Canada]

Roger Guetta –  Eureka Moments/App Use As Vehicle For Self Discovery And Catharsis [Canada]

Andrew B. White – iPhoneography

Chair: Gray Hodgkinson

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Symposium Abstracts
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Laurent Antonczak [AUT University / University of Strasbourg]

Mobile Devices and Art Museum, a new learning experience.
The commonplace mobile devices that visitors carry in their pockets are increasingly being used by art museums as educational resources that extend the visitor’s learning experience. By offering visitors platform-specific applications that deliver rich, dynamic content, museums are able to engage and educate visitors in new and exciting ways.

Within this context, Laurent Antonczak is currently leading a team of 10 researchers, based in Strasbourg (France), who are investigating the use of mobile technology to engage museums visitors in learning about a masterpiece, its author and about the social and political context of the creative work. This project aims to provide mobile users with a positive experience with the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (http://www.musees.strasbourg.eu/index.php?page=mamcshttp://www.musees.strasbourg.eu/index.php?page=mamcs ).

During his session, Laurent will give a quick overview of this specific project and will define some key elements of this project in relation to mobile phone, collaborative practice and user experience.
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Laurent has more than 10 years experience in digital strategies (branding, marketing, visual communication, social media, and emerging technologies for web and mobile phones). Laurent is co-founder of MINA.
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Rosângela Ap [Artist]
“Mobile Art” – Mapping, Analysis and Classification of Poetic Proposal to use Cell Phones

The text refers to research that aims to map to analyze the state of art which is called the “Mobile Art” in the period 2001 to 2010, we are soon to be a predominant mode of communication with contemporary features. This research is delimited in the use of cell phones “on” and “for” the production of poetics proposals because we believe that this already presents a variety of proposals on the integration of other communication technologies, making the complex analysis of all the demonstrations with other mobile devices. We believe that there is a need for reflection on this production and that the organization toward a mapping and classification will help future research on the subject. The theoretical basis for the analysis is based on authors who discuss the art in the digital context, using concepts of interactivity, digital aesthetics, new designs, content production as Vilém Flusser (2008), Oliver Grau (2007), Claudia Giannetti (2007), Pierre Lévy (2000), André Lemos (1997), Paul Weissberg (2003), among others, since many of the proposals have as main participation of the “public” in the work which also involves the discussion of co-authorship in this process.  The search results will be built a database of events related to the Mobile Art, national and international artists and groups; an opening of an online communication channel for the dissemination of research online and receive contributions throughout the project.

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Rosângela Ap (Rosângela Aparecida da Conceição) is an artist, designer, teacher, researcher and independent curator. Member of the researches groups CAT – science / art / technology (2009) and GIIP (2011), both certified by IA-Unesp/CNPq. Since 1996, regularly participates in exhibitions as an artist. Since 2005 presents lectures, workshops and courses in Art and Technology in cultural and educational institutions. Since 1996, regularly participates in exhibitions as an artist.
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Dr. Camille Baker [Brunel University]

MINDtouch: Mobile Media Performance

The mobile media performance project, MINDtouch: Ephemeral Transference, a PhD art research work completed in 2010 and published in 2011. It proposed that the mobile videophone become a new way to communicate non-verbally, in real time, across different physical and technological environments and locations. Users ‘VJ-ed’ or mixed video from a database live, and using their body data with wireless sensors they had abstract visual conversations with other mobile users, creating a collaborative, telematic collage of externalised body sensations. The goal was to expand and explore more embodied and meaningful exchanges between remote groups of people.

MINDtouch critically investigated, challenged, and extended the potential of performance practice through its live approach, using mobile and online networks. It was about the transmitting the sense of liveness and presence, through visual manifestations of embodied experiences through the mobile network.

It is my contention that lo-fi aesthetics of pixelated images add to the intimacy, authenticity and ‘realness’ of the mobile video medium, as well as making it more accessible to the users. Delays in the transmission render the work more ‘everyman’ in its nature and easier to relate to, while professional quality work creates a distance or disconnect from the common person and their everyday experience or ability. I will discuss these issues and the MINDtouch project in more depth in this paper, as well as new directions in non-verbal mobile expression and performance in my new work.

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Dr. Camille Baker is a lecturer and artist-performer/researcher/curator within various art forms: interactive and performance installation, music composition and performance, video art, web animation, and experience design.

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Associate Professor Lynne Ciochetto [Massey University]
Cellphones: and social services and for the ‘bottom billion’

Cellphone technology has become much more commonplace in western industrialized nations and amongst the middle and upper classes of emerging nations.  With the introduction of most technologies there are unexpected costs and benefits. One of the unexpected effects of cellphone technology has been the social benefits in emerging nations. Cellphones are an example how countries can leapfrog stages in technology. Poorer people in emerging economies, especially India and China have been able to bypass the stage of purchasing computers and can now access the internet through their cellphones. This possibility has brought unanticipated social benefits and potentially has major implications for improving the lives of millions of people. This presentation explores some emerging trends and pioneer work being conducted by companies such as Nokia in providing agricultural information to poor rural farmers in India and the access to microcredit and online banking in Bangladesh.

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Lynne is an Associate Professor in the College of Creative Arts at Massey University. With degrees in sociology and anthropology, a masters in sociology, a post-graduate diploma in development studies and three years post-graduate study in graphic design at the Basel School of Design her approach is interdisciplinary.

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Tiago Franklin R. Lucena [Universidade de Brasília. CAPES scholarship]
Mobile art pratices in Brazil: an overview

We want to show the many creative possibilities in the use of mobile devices in the art by focusing on creative practices in Brazil. It should be noted that mobile devices is a pervasive technology in this country. The brazilian culture and way of life facilitates the participation of individuals by integrating online social networking, using SMS or the Bluetooth network in everyday life and artistic experience for example. It focuses, however, in audiovisual production with these devices. Indeed, more than just creating narratives and fictional stories in proposals for micro-nanovídeos, brazilians pratices tries to document of the city’s problems, used for public denunciation, to record intimate scenes that contributes with the discussion around invasion of privacy. Not coincidentally, these themes are present in the videos submitted and presented at various festivals in the country that help create a framework for strengthening the practice in the region. Festivals such as: Cell.lucine, Mobilefest and ArteMov are three of the most representative in the country and are sponsored by mobile phone companies that contribute to create a  space of discussion and visibility for these productions. In a country of continental dimensions, other experiences are isolated groups of individuals who creatively use the device in various ways and emphases proving the versatility of the technology and re-given potential meanings for each culture and group.

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PhD candidate of Arts and Technology at University of Brasilia_Brazil. Area of Interest: In the field of Arts and Technology I have been investigating (practical-theoretical) Mobile Art and the use of mobile devices (cellphone, smartphones, netbooks) in arts, science and technology.
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Dr Christopher Fry  [University of Westminster]

Marking the possibilities: QR codes and new notions of space and place [UK]

QR (or Quick Read) codes have come to pervade the urban landscape. They are becoming a standard feature of print, billboard and TV advertising. By ‘scanning’ the code, those with a QR code reader on their mobile device can navigate to online content, such as a company’s website, or receive a message encrypted into the matrix of the QR code. These machine/mobile readable 2D barcodes offer connections to online spaces and texts, seemingly marking up physical space in the manner of a hypertext.

However, the QR code can be seen as more than merely a hyperlink. It has been reframed by artists as a window or portal onto other spaces and places. Their esoteric nature, being readable only by the mediating device, makes them signifiers of potential and possibility. They are symbols that suggest a connection but without revealing the destination since they require the interpretation of the device to translate. This automatic process is offered/presented as a physical act that extends the user’s own capabilities. This paper will examine the question: How can the QR code be employed to draw attention to new notions of space and place and our relationship with the mediating device?
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Dr. Chris Fry is an artist and teacher living in London. He currently teaches at the University of Westminster on the Contemporary Media Practice course, within the School of Media, Art and Design.

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Dean Keep [Swinburne University]
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Marsha Berry [RMIT University]

The Mobile Aesthetic: Exploiting the possibilities for Creative Practice

Mobile phones are intimate personal devices that are ideal for capturing ephemeral sights, sounds and experiences of the everyday. Their use has become second nature and they are an integral part of a postmodern habitus. We use them to communicate with others, for entertainment, to find our way through city streets, to meet people and to capture and share moments of personal significance.
Camera-phones enable visual artists and filmmakers to extend their creative practice whilst challenging perceptions and conventions surrounding the production and screening of digital video projects. Images and video captured on the mobile phone are generally not afforded the same status or prestige so often attributed to visual mediums such as photography and cinema, but this may also be viewed as an advantage, as it frees both the artist and the viewer from the intellectual baggage associated with more traditional visual media forms.
In this paper, with particular reference to art works produced by the authors, we examine the mobile aesthetic; looking at how camera-phones may be adopted as tools for the creation of video works that exploit the unique image quality of the camera-phone. The portability and technical capabilities of mobile technologies significantly alters relationships with media and creative practice, presenting new opportunities and strategies for artists to interrogate and interpret the ephemera of everyday experiences.
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Dean Keep
Dean is a Visual Artist and Lecturer in Digital Media at Swinburne University, Melbourne. He has been active in mobile art movement since 2004 and has exhibited work in national and international forums. The focus of his research is mobile media, emerging digital technologies and memory studies.
The 2 works below are both example of single channel mobile phone video installations.

Marsha Berry

Marsha’s research trajectory started in humanities with a focus on ethnography, ethnomethodology, language and performance studies. She has applied and extended her background in ethnography and post-structural critical discourse analysis to the emerging field of digital media.
Her creative practice includes photography, video art and poetry. Since 2007, she has explored the connections between technology, memory, place and displacement in her practice. She has exhibited her video art and images nationally and internationally. Her poetry has been published in Indian and American literary journals. Her current research projects investigate mobile social media, shifts in Vietnam and cultural memory studies.
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Daniel Mauro [University of Texas at Austin]

Speaking without Listening: Limitations of the Online Distribution and Accessibility of Amateur Video

While mobile and amateur videos capture details and moments often unseen in
commercial media, very few of these videos reach large numbers of viewers.
Production is plentiful, yet distribution and consumption pose challenges to any political
potential they may have. Such potential is too often assumed to be a part of the
technology, itself, perceived under shortsighted prospects that a technology such as a
mobile camera-phone inherently enables an effective, meaningful form of
communication. Much of the discourse of mobile and amateur video is surrounded by
its assumed democratizing qualities, yet this conception of democratic media neglects
the roles of distribution and access in yielding greater political potential. YouTube and
other video sharing sites offer potential in enabling a multivocal collection of content, but
whether or not those voices are actually heard is a much more complicated matter.
Producing and uploading a video online does not mean it will necessarily be received by
another viewer. Much of the disconnect between producer and viewer occurs because
the organization of such content online does not necessarily offer easy access to the
uploaded videos. The accessibility of mobile and amateur video online points to some
of the broader constraints and limitations in the realization of their political potential.
This paper asserts that accessibility is a key function in the online distribution and
political potential of these videos. Limitations of accessibility will be explored in an
examination of online video distribution networks, a study of the organization of
searches and content at popular video sharing sites, and a case study of an amateur
videographer uploading footage from the Libyan Revolution.
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Daniel Mauro is a doctoral student in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the
University of Texas at Austin. His current research focuses on histories of the
dissemination of amateur motion picture technologies. When not researching, he
makes his own films and videos with these technologies.

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Kasia Molga [Artist]
Saving the world with Twitter – musing on alternative ways of communications. Not necessary among humans.
So first we thought that the world is flat. We also thought that it is carried by a giant man called Atlas. Then we changed our perspectives a bit and were convinced that we are in the centre of the universe. Then, with the technological progress and invention of new communication tools,  slightly disappointed we discovered that we are just a tiny particle amongst the vastness of Cosmos and that our being on this world is not a divine creation but in fact it might be very accidental. Moreover it seems to be interdependent on millions of other factors and living species and that we are part of something called “biodiversity”.
However it also seems that our collaborative “ego” still keeps rejecting that idea that we are not the masters of the world but merely a small part of it. In the context of the state of environment and in fact self-preservation as species to keep playing around and having fun on our planet, it seems that again there is a time to shift out perception on what it is that thing called “our world” and how we can relate to it.
The modern, fast progressing communication, networked, data and social media technologies have revealed an entirely new layer and thus opportunity to explore relations with each other and other species.
Based on her own practice which often employs mobile media or related social media technologies and giving examples of other practitioners work (such as Active Ingredient, Sander Veenhoff and more), Kasia Molga asks – can we (and by “we” we mean all living creatures) start talking and can twitter really save the world?

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Kasia Molga is a visual artist and interaction designer whose practice is concerned with our relationship with the planet – Buckminster-Fuller’s concept of a “Spaceship Earth”; and changes in our perception: of ourselves and our roles in the context of nature, climate, environment and community in this increasingly technologically mediated world
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Roy Parkhurst  [Massey University]
A small history of cinematography: Walter Benjamin and the tradition of the city portrait

Paper for innovative exhibition/screening programme at the New Zealand, government-managed Film Archive which represented the first mobile filmmaking festival in New Zealand and one of the first in the southern hemisphere. This paper responded to independent filmmaker Adam Kossoff who submitted Moscow Diary (2011), one of the finest features to date made exclusively from mobile phone video footage. Kossoff’s film traces Walter Benjamin’s wanderings and diary about his travels to Moscow from 1926-27. This paper addresses the relationship between Benjamin’s theories of photography/cinematography, his travel diaries, and the tradition of the cinematic “city portrait” including such canonical titles as Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), Dziga-Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), & Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). This paper presents novel new connections and evidence of a deeper continuity between period theorization of the formative experimental cinema and the contemporary mobile filmmaking practices of today.
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Roy has been living and teaching in New Zealand since the mid-1990s. He came here from the United States where he studied and taught at The University of Florida, Ohio University and Guilford College. Roy also spent some time in the entertainment and journalism worlds and was Senior Editor of JAZZIZ Magazine from 1991-1996. He studied new media, film and literature off and on from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s and took up digital design practice in the early 1990s.

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Miss Pixels [Artist]

The Hashtag Project

The Hashtag Project is a beacon in MissPixels’ daily artistic production. She will discuss the creative process behind this series and how she strives to integrate this new concept in the 2.0 environment. This particular project is intended as a plastic interpretation of the confrontation between the virtual universe of the social networks and the real world. Choosing specific words, the artist indexes and classifies real environments using tools from the virtual world. Selecting the Smartphone as the medium for this concept is meant to intensify the link between the two worlds. MissPixels will present the #nightmare Project, which contains photos from New York, Montreal and Barcelona. She will also discuss the next step in the Hashtag Project: #dream.

The artist will share her intensely personal definition of mobile art, as well as her vision of movement in the context of contemporary art. She will also discuss the place mobile artists currently occupy in the art world and whether there should be room for them in traditional exhibition spaces. MissPixels will also discuss the method behind her work (in series, by concept), the apps she uses, and how spontaneity permeates her creative work. MissPixels will also try to convince you that she is not a photographer, but rather an Image Manipulator 2.0.

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MissPixels has participated in several exhibitions in countries that include Italy, Australia, the United States, Canada and Spain. She has received countless accolades and has given lectures in London, Montreal and New York City. She has also given several interviews to various newspapers, magazines and books.

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Roger Guetta [Artist]

Eureka Moments/App Use As Vehicle For Self Discovery And Catharsis

 

Re-working the real, uncovering a hidden universe, Roger Guetta captures
something of the avant-garde spirit. For Guetta, images are like phrases or
words. His aesthetics play on and with the image. The act of layering and
reassembling that is an essential part of the artist’s process is like
writing with images. But before that Guetta is a hunter-gatherer of imagery,
selecting and searching materials, objects and images from a range of
sources, a field, a beautiful model, or that forest of signs that is our
urban reality.

The journey Roger Guetta is on involves capturing visual cues. He then uses
all the microscopic and macroscopic details of our world layering, cropping
and enhancing them to build intensity in the final stages of his process. In
this sense, the process of formulating images in the multi-layering is like
a form of cognition. As intuitive visual investigations of the essential
mysteries of life, Guetta provides us with a variety of points of perception
within a single image. The image is no longer an icon, but instead a place
to visit, where we can find multiple points of experience that exist at the
fulcrum of the moment, or as many simultaneous moments, a sequence where
multiple images are used to build textures of visuality.
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Guetta uses the iphone exclusively as his tool of choice and promotes the
notion that because of the systematic deconstruction of our inate creative
instincts by the educational system we finally have a  convenient tool to
revisit that urge to create.

The mobile devise, affords each of us an opportunity to explore, experiment
and actualize works each and every day.

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Andrew Quitmeyer [Georgia Institute of Technology]

Semi-Automatic Filmmaking with Mobile Devices

Digital filmmaking has significantly impacted documentary films by decreasing the costs of production, editing, and distribution. Few digital affordances, however, have been applied to improve the actual filmmaking process; most documentary productions continue to abide by the legacy practices. First, documentarians gather massive amounts of subject information from archival footage, recorded interviews, and text. Next, the documentarians are forced to re-sort through the collected data and derive a structure for the eventual audio-video narrative. While this structural synthesis period distinguishes documentary from other film formats, as a stand-alone process it can be quite arduous.

Some video logging systems attempt to ameliorate the problem of sorting through droves of audio and video. These systems, however, are typically only used in large commercial or theatrical filmmaking as they rely on pre-established concrete master structures (such as shot lists). On the other side, database film projects fully automate the structuring of video into dynamically ordered segments or presenting spatialized, interactive clips. To form any sort of distinct narrative with these systems still requires the intense sorting and editing process of traditional filmmaking.

Documatic aims to simplify the arduous structural synthesis process by combining it with more the exploratory, spontaneous “information gathering” segment. Via an Android application and digital video source, mobile filmmaker pairs can add real-time annotations to recorded footage. As the amassed data is downloaded to a computer, Documatic combines the semantic and video data to create “pre-edited” rough-cut, video sequences for Adobe Premiere. The end product will be more or less indistinguishable from a traditional, linear documentary film, but the new formative process will hopefully be simpler, more efficient, educational, and fun.
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Andrew Quitmeyer is a polymath adventurer interested in discovering new means of exploring and sharing our world.
Digital Media PhD Student/Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology
www.andrewquitmeyer.com
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Dr. Max Schleser [Massey University]

Mobile-mentary (mobile documentary) 2.0
Mobile filmmaking entered the mediascape from 2004 onwards and not only introduced a new aesthetic but also established prospects for cultural innovation. The paper will point at the development in mobile video towards the sociability (de Souza e Silva 2006) and ‘connectivity’ of mobile filmmaking. The transformation of audience in creating these new documentary practices as an alternative cultural practice (Schleser 2009) is an indicator for not only a transforming art and design environment but also the emergence of a new understanding of creative processes. In the recent study Documentary and New Digital Platforms – an ecosystem in transition, one of the key elements outlined in the report by the Documentary Network is the dynamic new relationship with audiences. The current work-in-progress 24 Frames 24 Hours investigates the new forms of  “cultural mediation” (Houle 2011).  24 Frames 24 Hours is an international collaborative mobile documentary capturing the life in 24 hours in 24 different cities. The project kick started with an international collaborative mobile film-making workshop in Paderborn (Germany) and Wellington (New Zealand) and one in New York City (USA). The project examines collaborative practices and applies Cinéma vérité and Kino-Pravda practices in the digital realm. The study draws upon new paradigms of participation and simultaneously analyses creative processes. Besides the aesthetic refinement, the research project functions as a prototype for community involvement through creative practices.  The paper will review contemporary crowd-sourcing film projects and will analyse the emerging distinction between collaborative and co-creative practices.  Moreover the paper points at the industry presideces and will argue that process driven and participatory approaches require new frameworks to evaluate these media text. The paper will relate these developments to the bigger picture of innovation through a user-based interpretation of technology (Edgerton 2007) and will examine collaboration as a creative process (Gauntlett 2011).
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Dr. Max Schleser is a filmmaker who explores mobile devices as creative and educational tools. Max is Subject Director Digital Media at Massey University and co-founder of FILMOBILE (www.filmobile.net) and MINA (www.mina.pro), Mobile Innovation Network Aotearoa.

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Daniel Wagner [Unitec]

Entertainment Lab for the Very Small Screen (ELVSS)

The ELVSS project challenged film students to adapt the traditional storytelling conventions they’re learning to emerging creation and delivery platforms.

25 Students in the Bachelor of Performing and Screen Arts at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland were lent iPhones to shoot and iPads to edit material, and created an interweaving series of very short films, for optimum delivery on mobiles.

Called to question in the teaching are new considerations for creating and packaging narrative. How might story structure be adapted to best suit the realities of the new delivery media? What effect do video compression and smaller screens have on our choices related to Shot Size, Framing, Camera and Actor Movement, Editing, etc? What are the sonic possibilities and how can we further them to create richer environments? What are the potentials for interactivity (such as QR codes and user-enabled hotspots)?

By the end of the 11-week course, they produced five mobisodes, each of which connect to one another at one or two points. Along the way, they’ve been guided to grapple with creating their own macro and micro working and learning structures and have learned to negotiate between creative teams. The learning that occurs is not data transferred from a lecturer’s head to the students’, but is an experiential journey in an unfolding idiom where the outcome is both unfixed and unknown at the beginning of the process. It is the use and recognition of the potentials of the tools that become the learning content itself.

Students in a contemporary best-practice film school, forging a new pathway, are being challenged to apply traditional cinematic methods and sensibilities to newly-developing concepts and new media tools.
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Dan has been working in various aspects of the entertainment industry for quite awhile now. In the mid 70’s, he was part of an experiment in social-change-focussed television in Los Angeles, serving on the programming staff and also on the camera crew in their live-TV studio. Moving to San Francisco in 1980, Dan became a segment producer for a local TV programme, also directing music videos for some influential left-field bands of the day. Since 2005, he’s been a Lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. Untirogero He teaches both Cinematography and Emerging Technologies and is the E-Learning Community Coordinator for the Department of Performing and Screen Arts at Unitec.

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Gavin Wilson [York St John University]

The Body as Physical Conduit for Experience in a Phenomenology of Cell Cinema

The screening of films made on mobile phones to one or more spectators, either on a mobile phone or projected before an audience, significantly changes the material instrumentality of the phone film with profound consequences for its reception. In this process, the phone film transitions from a particularised kind of audio-visual artefact recording a filmmaker’s personal experience, to become the material component of a potentially innovative discourse, sharing characteristics of cinematic form whilst foregrounding other features specific to it.
The term I favour for this mode of audience engagement, cell cinema, describes an innovative mode of media discourse in two significant ways: The first links the filmmaker and spectator in a more direct relationship of individualised communication, foregrounding its cellular interaction in a physical, biological or, as Deleuze says, a rhizomatic sense. The second involves them in a physically co-present form of participatory engagement within film festivals. This paper and selected film examples investigates the centrality of the human body in phone film engagement, of an enhanced encounter with the sensual, challenging the physical distancing of theatrical projection. The writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty brings us back to phenomenological experience, revealing the act of seeing as contingent on objective thought about the world. Additionally, I look at how the earlier writing of Henri Bergson offers a physiological conception of the body’s function in human perception. The mobile phone and the human gaze forge a bridging link between people, connecting through vision, appealing to an immediate if mediated sensory experience. As Merleau-Ponty says, ‘to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it’.
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Prior to undertaking my current academic research project under a Studentship awarded by York St John University, I worked as a Sector Manager for Screen Yorkshire, one of the UK’s development agencies for screen media.
During most of my earlier freelance career I worked as a cameraman on film and TV dramas, commercials and music promos for UK-based and international production companies, and continue to write narrative fiction screenplays.
Interspersed with my freelance production work, I have also taught media and visual communications studies at a number of UK colleges.
The subject matter for this paper expresses a particular line of enquiry expounded in my doctoral thesis, due for completion in 2013.

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Andre B White [Artist]
iPhoneography

The use of the cellular phone as a device for photography has been somewhat lacklustre until recently. The advent of point-and-shoot digital cameras and the subsequent integration of this technology into cell phones in the mid-2000s allowed for instantaneous image capture. Whilst someone might not always carry a camera with them they would likely always carry a cell phone. The combination of a usable camera on a device that was always at the ready opened up possibilities for capturing images anywhere and at any time.
After the novelty of having ‘a camera on your phone’ wore off and the images were deemed suitably awful (in a pure sense) due to limited optics and resolution, several years past before the cellphone camera evolved in to the photographic tool of today. Fast forward to the iPhone. Initially with a very limited 2 megapixel camera it was still just ‘another average camera on cell phone’ (albeit a cutting edge cell phone). That was until the advent of the App Store in 2008. The App Store offered up applications that could edit and enhance the images from the inbuilt camera. Suddenly images taken on the iPhone, in combination with these third party apps, became ‘works of art’; the limitations of the technology became its strengths and the term ‘iPhone photography’ or ‘iPhoneography’ was coined. Images were shot, app’d and shared, communities built, hierarchies established, exhibitions staged, articles written, critiques and definitions applied. Joe Public became a photographer (an ‘iPhoneographer’); people who had never considered themselves to be creative became ‘artists’ through their iPhone photography. Professionals ditched their DSLRs for portability and instant results.

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