This can happen when marketing meets art. When a WASP* Yale MBA meets anthropology and thinks: "I´m an artist at MBA Level!"
At the recently held C | summit Cameraphones 2004 the "OneWorld/OneDay Project" (1; 2) was announced:
"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, while driving adoption and U.S. uptake. We intend for this project to be bigger than Hands Across America, more artistically impactful than Burning Man, and more fun than the Macarena. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to charities benefitting the vision impaired. This will lead to an open group brainstorming about ways to tip the market for mobile imaging."
This may end up in a somehow downsized project with beauties from BayWatch and B-movies: "How do you create a fad around camera phone? Moses [one of the developers of the Cameraphone Summit] suggested an event he called "One World One Day" during Valentine's Day 2005. The aim would be to convince 10,000 camera phone users plus 1,000 student photographers to upload 50 million images of things they loved. Celebrities would be encouraged to participate so that students, for example, could follow around TV and movie stars for a day. The consensus of the Camera Phone Summit audience, however, was that it would be extremely difficult to engineer a "fad."." (1; 2)
Anthropology. Fad. Uhm. That is the background. So all the initial announcement has actually been was nice phrase mongering with cheap phrases and some pseudo intellectual deficiency together with some generic statements everybody would underline... . The classical hot air marketing speech in 5 seconds, full of altruism.
We hope it turns out a success this time: the Rx Gallery, located at the beautiful 132 Eddy Street in San Francisco, has announced "MPPS: The Mobile Phone Photo Show", curated by Kurt Bigenho and Gregory Cowley. Tenor of the project is hopefully not this sentence: "This is, we admit, just a theory…."
"Rx Gallery invites you to participate in a curatorial experiment – a photography show composed entirely of images created with mobile phone cameras. Anyone, anywhere, can send in any image (made with a mobile phone camera), and we will display it.
From May 20 through June 18, 2004, participants from all over the world are invited to send us their photos. We will display the collected images continuously, 24 hours a day, on monitors throughout the gallery. On our main wall we will display thumbnail printouts of the photos, starting, on opening night, with a completely blank wall. During the course of the show, as the images are emailed to us, the wall will gradually fill up with 1000s of examples of this very intimate, dynamic, candid, immediate and brand-spanking new art form (embedded in a consumer technology).
The mobile phone has rapidly become an indispensable prop of daily, modern existence. You carry it with as easily and handily as you do your house keys, or your wallet. What are the perceptual and communicative ramifications of adding new technologies (photography, video) to this already ubiquitous device? What will people do with a camera they take with them everywhere? What type of photography will non-photographers produce?
Interestingly – images taken with cell phones, though undeniably crappy in many ways (poor fidelity and resolution), are often astonishingly poetic and immediate. They are rich with personal meaning, perhaps because, already, the cell phone is becoming a part of us, an appendage – thus we have an intimate relationship with the technology, and this intimacy bleeds into the images created with this technology.
This is, we admit, just a theory….
We hope to collect, during the course of the show, a survey of mobile phone photography, not as a joke or a gimmick, but as a real investigation, in a manner that’s distributed and worldwide, into the potentials and qualities of this new (and for the moment unselfconscious) medium. For one month, Rx Gallery in San Francisco will become the epicenter of this process of collection. If you can, we’d like you to participate."
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."
Who get´s the money? That´s end-user created content again... . Rx Gallery is a Wine&Sake Bar/Lounge.
There is another event: SENT at the six space contemporary art gallery in LA: "SENT will be the first major exhibit of phonecam art in the United States."
"We'll explore the camera phone's potential as a creative tool in two ways: through an online public dialogue in which amateur photographers and phonecam users around the world share mobile snapshots of their lives; and through an invitational exhibit in which professional photographers, artists, and public figures test the limits of creative possibilities offered by these hybrid devices.
Phonecams are changing the way we see the world, and our place within it. They're an extension of urban eyes. They democratize, hack, and deconstruct photography. When everyone is both photographer and publisher, how will art change? How will human conversation change? What will be the difference between professional and amateur? Through SENT, we'll find out.
During a specific period of time leading up to SENT, and while the in-gallery exhibit is under way, images will be submitted by the public and published through an online, massively collaborative phonecam blog. A grid of multiple plasma screens in the sixspace gallery will display these images."
Some artists are contributing to SENT. The website shows their particular URLs. Maybe you see someone you know: Clayton Cubitt, Elizabeth Daniels and others.
[Projected Exhibit Date of SENT: July 2004. Press coverage of this event: 1 (BoingBoing); 2 (The Feature); 3 (Smartmobs), 4 (The Guardian]
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*To come clean: a WASP is a "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant", it´s not "We Are Satan's People", a "Weasel Attack Signal Processor" nor "What A Strange Person"
