In 2006, mobile phones outnumbered the volume of film and digital cameras combined. However, no industry standards for the production and consumption of new and emerging video formats have been established. Simultaneously, a proliferation of creative mobile media has surfaced within the field of artistic practice and documentary filmmaking.

 

In 2000, the first camera phone was introduced in Japan and this year, mobile devices including 12 megapixel cameras and features such as locative media and Augmented Reality applications further expand the horizon of the mobile mediascape. The Mobile Creative and Innovation forum looked at the latest trends in relation to artistic, social, cultural and economic prospects of mobile media in 2010.

 

This year’s forum is the fifth of the FILMOBILE event series, which have taken different formats in the last years including cinema screening and exhibitions.

 

FILMOBILE emerged out of my own PhD research, which demonstrated the new emerging possibilities for such filmmaking, and creative collaborative media practice through the recent phenomenon of mobile media. The FILMOBILE event on the 24th September at the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology featured eight presentations by artists and filmmakers showcasing their work.

 

The forum featured an engaging Q&A session with more than 30 guests including leading academics and independent practitioners from the Creative Industries. The first session on mobile filmmaking was chaired by Professor Joram Ten Brink (Director of the Centre for Documentary Film at the University of Westminster) and featured presentations by Dr Adam Kossoff (Filmmaker, University of Wolverhampton), Eloise Villez (MA History of Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck University), Julia Kazarina (HeARTbeat Festival Yekaterinburg, Russia) and Sylvie Prasad (Photographer, University of East London).

 

I organised the event and chaired the second panel on mobile art. Dr Chris Fry (Artist, University of Westminster), Jorge Lopes Ramos (Zecora Ura, University of East London) and ?artist Kasia Molga explored participator projects that engage the audience through mobile media art and mobile performance.

 

The discussions and presentations in the first panel centered around the development of mobile aesthetics, personal and intimate filmmaking approaches, including discussions on the notion of memory and diary filmmaking. The second panel pointed at the participatory prospects of mobile art and illustrated ways to engage audiences in a number of ways ranging from text messaging to interactive theatre performances.

 

 

 

 

 

Julia Kazarina is a Photographer and Media Artist from Ekaterinburg, and organiser of the HeARTbeat Festival, a festival of mobile creativity in Russia. She showed mobile phone pictures, exhibited and curated at the festival last year. The first set of images which she presented, are kaleidoscopic pictures printed in large format and the second set were a display of a collaborative montage work. The mobile montage reflects the diary format by means of displaying a rather private collection of images taken by the people of Ekaterinburg. Here, cityscapes are juxtaposed with flowers and metal items photographed by a factory worker.

 

May Days is a work-in-progress mobile project by Sylvie Prasad using mobile photography and mobile video revealing the life of Sylvie’s mother who has Alzheimer's Disease. Her project explores mobile video as a technology to capture notions exploring memory, belonging and autobiography. In her project, the mobile phone is used to keep a record of her mother’s everyday life. Through the immediate playback function of the phone, the mobile clips can remind her mother of her daily activities and support her in terms of sharing memories, which she would not otherwise recall. The mobile as a visual communication device can stand in for the loss of the short-term memory and a sense of belonging.

 

 

 

In the second panel, Chris Fry explored interaction and participation through his online mobile text based art-work The Magic Ray. The mobile project separates brain patterns from a mobile signal and provides insights into the inner workings of one’s mind. Pervasive and locative media art works allow to explore the role of the audience in engaging in the work. Similar to the filmmaker’s experimentation with the low-res video, Chris is focusing on text messages as a common denominator for interaction that is available to almost everyone in the contemporary mediascape.

 

 

 

In the round table discussions, it emerged that mobile media can provide a starting point for new talents to enter the film world and simultaneously function as a form of self-discovery. Short mobile films allow more people to express themselves and engage with their environment through a visual representation. Mobile filmmaking in its current state, encompasses environments ranging from the big screen in international festivals to private moments shared on the small screen. Some photos and videos taken on the phone devices remain on the phone, while others enter the media scape for public exposure.

 

 

In the Q&A session, I talked about his mobile projects and mentioned that distribution is of key interest to the industry. I exemplified this through my own work, which has been described as pioneering for the effort to bring a city film out of the cinema and back into the city. These micro-movies are more like a text message than a short film, and I aim to open up questions in relation to the visuals and narrative. The formulation of storytelling is rather a “story architecture” that allows for engagement - not only with the community, but also the location.

 

The panel noted that mobile media can function as tool for augmenting one’s senses. Mobile technology can start a conversation and provides access to a process in which an art work or story to be shared or rather collaborative created. The FILMOBILE event emphasised the innovative potential in mobile media, and that creativity is the key to unlock and ignite the mobile wave.