Update to this story:
"Moblogging Art Exhibitions MPPS and SENT: No more Hot Air Marketing Speeches this Time, please".
RX Gallery describes that the Mobile Phone Photography Show (MPPS) "allows participants from around the world to send photographs taken with their mobile phones. This participatory installation will capture and process thousands of mobile phone photographs sent in by participants from all over the world."

[©Mrs. Johnson]
After what has happened or will happen to the "OneWorld/OneDay Project" (1;2) of the C | summit Cameraphones 2004 ("A presentation about a proposed non-profit project is based on the goal of documenting the beauty and passion of all human life for one 24 hour period on Valentines Day of the year 2005 by 100,000 cameraphones, photographers and videographers throughout the world. The project will coordinate access to celebrities for student film makers and photographers. We believe that this would become the most valuable reference for anthropologists in five hundred years"), we predicted not fully unmalicious that these MPPS and SENT shows would somehow lead to something like this:
We´ll see. Our blasphemous answer to "This is, we admit, just a theory": this will end in an event with thousands, maybe millions cloned images of cloned John Smithes:
"Hi, I´m John Smith from Houston, TX. Here you can see my girlfriend kissing me."
"Hi, I´m John Smith from Wellington. Here you watch me kissing my girlfriend."
"Hi, I´m John Smith from Edinburgh. Here can you see my Ex-girlfriend kissing her new boyfriend."
"Hi, I´m John Smith from Vancouver. Here can you see the Ex-boyfriend of my Ex-girlfriend kissing my sister."
And finally someone might (utmost conjunctive mood available) say:
Hi, I´m with the XYZ Gallery; it is a Wine&Sake Bar/Lounge. You know, we got all these bills and payrolls, now that we are the Best Art Gallery in SF and around. You know, MPPS is nice: you bring in the pix, we add some meaning to it, somehow hazy, blurred, fuzzy and bit of buzz around...we got someone to write about it...finally somehow it´s art...everyone´s happy. ("You don´t have to be a genius. You don´t have to be superhuman. You don´t even have to be a techie. Just have an idea." Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift)
Jeanne Carstensen (SF Gate) finally has visited the Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery in SF ("Cellph Portrait, Mobile Phone Photography Show at RX Gallery") and has done an excellent job to metawrite about metaphotography. If the MMPS is only one tenth as interesting as the cascade of words at SF Gate, The Mobile Phone Photo Show on the other side of the Oakland Bridge is definetely worth a visit: on view through June 18, 132 Eddy Street @ Mason (hey, and remember, Typepad will be down later today, so no need to sit in front of your blank mac display tonight). Jeanne Carstensen writes:
[...]in short, casual visual jottings from inside the quiteness of daily life.
[...]Another thing that stands out is the insubstantiality of the images, the sense of impermanence.
[...]the thrill of zapping a photo to a friend in Brooklyn as you stand on a street corner in London. Who knows if you'll ever look at that photo again?
[...]Susan Sontag pointed out...this endless flow of personal imagery...means photographs have become "less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated."
[...]The final photograph -- will it even be saved on a hard disk or printed out? -- is not necessarily imagined as a permanent, possibly incriminating object.
[...]As the number of images grows -- they're up to about 1,500 [350 participants from 50 countries] -- a patchwork of an estimated 10,000 photographs will eventually cover most of the wall, creating what co-curators Kurt Bigenho and Greg Crowley call a global "metaphotograph."
[...]But the low-res aesthetic of camera-phone photography also has a homey appeal, reminiscent of the slightly soft or unfocused look of early Polaroid cameras or the plastic Holga, loved by art students everywhere for the effects of its light leaks and imprecise, watery lens.
[...]Two of the hottest issues surrounding camera-phone use, however, are not explored deeply in this show.
And for these issues and the truly remarkable last two sentences with "love" and "affair"--
read the article.
[via Alan Reiter, where we finally had to learn that his suggestions to Xeni Jardin regarding the SENT project never found an answer. Let´s see what the future brings.]
[Update May 31: see also "Camera Phone Mural"]