Trading in Images

Here are a couple of pix / screen captures of Immobilité from the live exhibition in Milan's Piazza Duomo:



But how did this happen? The short list:

1. London, August 2006. Thinking that I should use my first-generation Nokia mobile phone to make short video art works. Experiments ensue.
   
   
2. Paris, September 2006. A random word on a sign that does not say "immobilité" but that conjures up the word "immobilité" anyway, even as I am capturing data at various art sites for the first work in my Mobile Phone Video Art Classics series.
   
   
3. Cornwall, June - August 2007. A new Nokia N95 and a small cast and crew fleshing out, via intersubjective culture jamming and image embodiment, the word / idea / concept art project "immobilité" even as the sun refuses to shine, or especially as the sun refuses to shine (although it eventually fakes everybody out, makes an appearance, the way any image makes an appearance, and the production fills with the same color that stimulated the Abstract Expressionist painting movement in the UK post-WWII).
   
   
4. 16 months later: after many video edits and sound studio sessions in Kailua, Paris, Austin, and Boulder, the so-called first feature-length mobile phone art film is close to being finished.
   
   
5. The work opens at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City.
   
   
6. Remixes from the immobilite.com website are sent to various urban screen curators all over the world by way of the Streaming Museum.
   
   
7. The images above, i.e. images captured on a mobile phone in Cornwall bluetoothed to and edited on a laptop in Kailua, Boulder, Paris, et al, remixed into a stream playing on a screen in a Piazza in Milan that is also being captured by a web cam that transmits the image snapshot back over the network to the same laptop that edited the remix and that now takes a screenshot of, converts to jpg and uploads to blog.

That's at least one way of telling the story.

There are an infinite number of other ways to tell this story, but this one, a fiction like all of the rest, will have to do for now.

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Metadata: Immobilité, urban screens, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Chelsea Art Museum, Streaming Museum,mobile phone