Still Mobile

BACKGROUND: Deploying video and sculpture in an ethnographic examination of mobile media art Still Mobile presents the infinite regress of mobile screens with urban spaces transformed through a series of mobile phone exercises. capturing the mediated moment when a phone user decides to narrate and defer experience. The mobile co-presence is further echoed by an unknown watching mobile phone that renders the moment into a sea of infinite regress. CONTRIBUTION: Mobile media is now an international interdisciplinary debate reflecting on media practices as cultural and personal expressions as well as a lens for magnifying everyday practices, see G. Goggin and L. Hjorth Routledge Companion of Mobile Media (2014). This series of mobile phone images of people taking pictures via their mobile phone extends my interest in mediated forms of intimacy by exploring the types of haptic exercises happening in public spaces. Mobile phone users can be found everywhere photographing and sharing images with co-present others. This replaces, and yet re- enacts many rituals-eg substituting the candle/lighter held up at a concert-for seas of mobile screens documenting and sharing moments and memories. From images of people in public taking pictures via their phones to a quasi-entertainment indoor golf course gone awry, Still Mobile reflects upon the game of being mobile- temporally, spatially and technologically-while being simultaneously and paradoxically immobile. SIGNIFICANCE: Still Mobile explores one version of 'being in the moment' in an age of networked social media. By focusing upon various mobile moments as abstractions it explores the competing screen culture that has become everyday life. It presents a window into the infinite regress of screen culture today. With over 2400 hits, it provides a new contribution to art and mobile media intersections. Part of prestigious, internationally advertised art residency, Gyeonggi Creation Center, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.