Nick Jones

I’m sitting in an airport lounge on my way to the West Coast where I’ll be visiting clients before heading over to Orlando at the weekend for our annual US Symposium. This means that for once I’m reading a newspaper in the morning.

I’ve just read an article about a UK art show where volunteers were allowed to climb on one of the plinths in Trafalgar square in the centre of London and do pretty much anything they wanted, in public, in the name of art. This included dancing, standing naked, pretending not to be a pigeon, advertising, heckling passers by and desperately trying to get a date. Now I’m not going to get sucked into arguments about whether such pythonesque activities constitute art, but in my humble view some of these probably qualify. I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Airport lounges are boring places where the mind wanders, and mine just wandered into thinking about mobiles and art. For some reason the artistic community seems to have pretty much ignored mobile phones. This seems a shame, a device which is personal, ubiquitous, communicates, computes, can display information, senses things in its vicinity and takes photos and videos ought to provide a thousand opportunities for creative art. And exhibits of photos taken on handsets don’t count. Mobiles haven’t been entirely ignored by artists, I know of installations where phones were hung from the ceiling to display things, collaborative works of literature created using SMS and MMS, mobiles as musical instruments, and one artist created a work using 5000 discarded handsets as a comment on waste and recycling. But many of the examples I’m aware of tend to use the mobile for audio or imaging, or as an object in a construction. They don’t really exploit its potential as an information device, I guess that’s because art colleges don’t teach useful skills like mobile application development.

If you know of any interesting works of art that use mobiles let me know. And if you’re an artist maybe it’s time to learn Symbian or iPhone programming so you can do some really innovative things. And following the principle of citizen-artists demonstrated in Trafalgar Square why don’t we all try to create some ironic mobile screensavers with slogans such as “I could have been a work of art” to comment on the boring state of mobile handset design. If I do this alone it’s just the act of a single sad Brit, but if thousands of us do it, it might just count as Art.