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Dear Kevin<br><br>
Rachel suggested I send you this text for the Rhizome list. If you would
prefer just details of the programme you can get it from
<a href="http://www.futuresonic.com/" eudora="autourl">www.futuresonic.com</a>
or in edited form at <a href="http://www.futuresonic.com/email" eudora="autourl">www.futuresonic.com/email</a>.<br><br>
We have had some festival events already, but it really kicks off this Friday - with a profile live event featuring Shu Lea Cheang (RICHAIR2030) and Marko Peljhan (SIGNAL\_SEVER!), as well as many other fantastic projects in the exhibition and around the streets of Manchester UK. Marko and Shu Lea will participate in the conference, alongside Sadie Plant, Andreas Broeckmann, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Matt Adams from Blast Theory, Armin Medosch, Marc Tuters, Tapio Makela, Colin Fallows … and many more.<br><br>
Hope there is time! (I have been flat out and only just saw Rachel's mail)<br><br>
Thanks<br><br>
Drew Hemment<br><br>
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Director, Futuresonic, International Festival of Electronic Music and Media Arts<br>
AHRB Research Fellow, Creative Technologies, University of Salford<br>
<a href="http://www.loca.org.uk/" eudora="autourl">http://www.loca.org.uk<br>
</a><a href="http://www.futuresonic.com/" eudora="autourl">http://www.futuresonic.com<br>
</a><a href="http://www.mobileconnections.org/" eudora="autourl">http://www.mobileconnections.org<br><br>
<br>
</a>At 16:43 20/04/2004, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Hi Drew <br><br>
Sorry I didn't back to you on this. I am a big fan of shu lea and marko and it would be great to get a text on your premise. Can you just post it to list@rhizome.org? I will make sure Kevin sees this too. he is cc'd and is the person who is now editing Net Art News. Thanks <br>
</blockquote><br><br>
<br>
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<b>Mobile Connections<br>
<br>
</b>The Mobile Connections strand of the Futuresonic04 festival explores new horizons in wireless and mobile media, and looks at the diverse ways in which artists and technical innovators are pushing the limits, and soliciting unexpected or unforeseen results from communication media past and present, from the radio to mobile telephony and wireless LAN. The aim is to look beyond the technologies themselves towards issues to do with participation, perception and process they raise, through the exhibition, live events, conference, workshops and interactive experiences in the city streets.<br>
<br>
Just as recording enabled sound to be heard apart from the place and time of its creation and radio made possible remote listening, so a new generation of communication technologies are now reconfiguring geographical, cultural and perceptual space, and transforming the nature of the art object and the art event. Mobile Connections seeks to sketch the outlines of emerging artforms that are coalescing around artists, programmers and DIY technologists who are responding to new technical tools by asking what can be experienced now that could not be experienced before, and that force us to reassess the ways of representing, relating to and moving in the world that have gone before. Some are exploring how the mobile phone might be transformed into an instrument in the way that radio and the turntable were in the 20th Century, examining how wireless technologies affect our daily lives, or seeking to make visible and audible the signals and transmissions that fill the air around us. Others are looking at how mobile technologies can take art out of the galleries and off the screen, the potential of interfaces unfettered by wires and cables for performance or interaction, and the kinds of communication and creative expression that emerge within networks with no fixed centre, but rather multiple, mobile nodes. <br>
<br>
The rapid uptake of the mobile phone, both in the West and increasingly in the global South, the proliferation of wireless networks, and the promise of pervasive computing in which networked devices become embedded in the environment around us has created a space that increasing numbers of people are starting to explore. But unlike the internet, which promised unlimited potential before being colonised by commercial forces, wireless networks are centralised and proprietary, access to DIY innovation denied. Highlighting the artificial scarcity that underlies the telecoms market, and the absurdity of selling off bands of the electromagnetic spectrum for short term gains, the Free Networks movement empowers people to build their own wireless networks, its goal not just to leak bandwidth but to establish an independent and free wireless infrastructure.<br>
<br>
The marketing of commercial wireless networks and third generation mobile phones has a now familiar hollow ring, but outside the corporate technology push, grass roots movements are opening up horizons not foreseen by the marketers, often setting the pace in technical innovation. The area that is perhaps generating the most excitement, and that has caught the imagination of a new generation of artists, is the emergent field of Locative Media. Rather than distance becoming irrelevant, the ability to determine location has emerged as central with wireless and mobile technologies, for the delivery of contextual information, or to engage in proximity and co-location. Assigning data with spatial coordinates so that it can be accessed from particular points, Locative Media explores how networked mobile devices, when combined with positioning technologies such as GPS, may be used for social communication and organisation, or for artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes its canvas.<br>
<br>
The question of location within art is by no means new. All art engages in location to some degree, in the way that it articulates contextual meaning
