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Drift Net > net art The Art of the Camera Phone
Residents of Left Coast’s largest city are never without two things – their cars and their cell phones. So turning phonecams into art was the next natural extension.Sixspace, an art gallery in downtown Los Angeles, is putting out a call to all camera phone users to submit their cellular snapshots for submission to the gallery's online exhibit SENT. The in-studio exhibit will open in February 2004 and will feature printed and electronic phonecam works by invited professional photographers and artists. But the online exhibit, which tentatively launches in January, will feature all public submissions -- be they photos of the family cat, the inside of an empty refrigerator, the crazy next door neighbor -- whatever. You snap it, they post it. "It's this weird limiting format [the camera phone] and we wanted to force photographers to do something really interesting within the limitations of 300 pixels," said Sean Bonner, sixspace's co-curator. Bonner said the idea for SENT came from Xeni Jardin, a technology writer and SENT co-curator, who thought the invention that prompted dozens of upscale health clubs to freak out and confiscate cell phones at the front door could be used for art. The spontaneous, unstructured use of camera phones is what marks the difference between a picture taken on a phone and the one taken with a traditional camera, said Bonner. Unless you're a member of the paparazzi or a tourist you generally don't toddle around town camera in tow, but people always carry their cell phones. "People take pictures of things [with their phones] that they never would have before. It's documenting the un-noteworthy, it's seeing the world through someone else's eyes just for a second," said Bonner. Sixspace is talking to the major cell phone companies to see about securing corporate sponsorship for the project. As for why the dual in-house/online exhibit Bonner said: "Online is the place where the phone photos exist in their perfect form. It's this unifying thing that you can't do with any other medium. To ignore that would be to miss out on a very important thing." |
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