CCAP Research Community

As a kind of adition to the question of mobility discussed in a previous post, I came across this today, in comments by artist Giselle Beiguelman (in Mark Amerika’s great book, Meta/Data). Beiguelman has made a number of really interesting mobile phone art pieces (among other things). She also has a generous attitude to the social - often creating a very interesting context for collaboration in her works. Her comments are concise, and seem to me to sum up what is both innovative and challenging about mobility (they can also be taken to be about more than mobile phones). For her -

… the mobile phone projects are far away from our traditional background. They are nomadic devices, and they make us think of different artistic interventions conceived to be experienced on the move, in between, while doing other things. They are not contemplative at all .. they point to new reading contexts, and as always, it is important to keep in mind that you do not talk about a world of reading without talking about a reading of the world. In this sense, they will probably force us to redefine our understanding of what is art. They demand new concepts and art experiences tuned with entropy and acceleration. (Meta/Data: 270)

New forms of “singularization” (that allow some room for play and invention, modes of living, that are not pre-determined by “outcomes” and so on) involve shifts in our “ethico-aesthetic” paradigm, as Guattari called it. This is more or less how ethics and embodied experience come together in specific contexts, as described in my previous post as the way in which love and work come together in an often networked experience. The ongoing task is to find singular alternatives within the new mobility that escape the “mobilization” of mobility in the direction of standardization and performativity or simplistic understandings of the social in terms of basic economic productivity. To do this within the context of mobility, we need new concepts and aesthetic paradigms that deal with the new forms of social “entropy and acceleration”. And as much as I like “contemplation” it is also true that, whether this is to survive or not, what we used to gain (and lose) from the contemplative needs perhaps to be reconfigured, precisely as networked embodied experience, subject to new entropies and accelerations.