Collaborative moblog and ephemeral self-portraits

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Presentation Title:
  • Collaborative moblog and ephemeral self-portraits

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Abstract:

  • This is an artist presentation of a collaborative self-portrait moblog and its final piece. The project started as a practical focus of a theoretical research on mobile media. Going through studies on the uses of this kind of media and the possibilities it offers, I decided to created a project that had and artistic intention as well a technological experimentation.

    Peculiaris is inspired by concepts of an identity that is open, fluid, and mutant. This identity is represented by photo self-portraits produced with camera phones. Mobile phones have changed with time, they are not a mere wireless telephone anymore, and in addition they have become powerful devices for communication. Nowadays a mobile phone can be an instrument to produce media, with them we can record audio, video, take photos, write text, send and receive emails, navigate on the web, and so on and so forth. The project Peculiaris decided to experiment with one of these features of the new mobile phones: the still image (photography).

    Peculiaris.net intends to collect assorted “identity photos”, these ephemeral end fragile emotions of mobile self-portraits. Zgymunt Bauman, in the book Identity, when reflecting over identity uses the theory of Beata Frydryczak to say that the hero of modernity lives the moment, the “here and now”, it couldn’t be a collector, unless he/she would be a collector of sensations, emotions, Erlebnisse.

    After one year automatically collecting self-portraits, in June 2008, a final piece will come out of this experimentation; it will be a slide show of the self-portraits sent to the moblog. The photos will be displayed on a 7-inch digital picture frame and presented on art museum and/or galleries. The point is to have the art museum as the place for legitimize this “temporary” archival of self-portraits.

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