Roaming - Installation Description

This installation is designed to situate a visitor at the technological and financial interface of Mongolian white phone workers who operate on the streets of Ulaanbaatar. It includes a projection of a series of straight-on photographs of different phone workers with different stands offering time for sale. The visitor is positioned in front of the projection screen as if he/she is about to purchase a call. While standing at this interface, he/she will be encouraged to recognize a form of public mobile telephony. City maps of Ulaanbaatar are projected onto the floor along with the footprints of wireless phone corporations that operate in the city. The visitor is thus be positioned as if a user who is standing within the footprints of the Mongolian wireless infrastructure. The piece is designed to simulate and stage an act of "roaming" – wireless use in another country – but rather than being charged additional fees, the visitor will learn about a different configuration of mobile telephony. The installation is intended to emphasize technological variation in the context of globalisation, the figurative relocations that occur through transnational infrastructures, and the dialectics of distance and proximity that shape wireless encounters.

Transmediale 2008

I am in Berlin at the Transmediale festival and conference this week. I arrived on Tuesday just in time to set up my installation before the opening, which started at 7pm. My installation is called Roaming and is in the main exhibition hall at the Center for World Cultures. I will also be giving a lecture about this project on Fri Feb 1 at 5:30pm in the Bilderberg Salon. I'll be posting some comments about various talks as the week proceeds. Above are some photos of the opening night. There is more information about Transmediale available here: http://www.transmediale.de/site/en/transmediale/home/

Back on the Satellite Coast - Sputnik's 50th Birthday

October 4, 1957 is the 50th anniversary of Sputnik's launch. Francis Hunger, creator of the Sputnik Gazetteer,Germany has helped to organize a variety of international events. You can find information about them here: http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~francis/irmielin/works/sputnik/_externalmaterial/issue6.pdf

I will be giving a lecture on Sputnik in my Satellite Media class at UC Santa Barbara from 4-5:20pm in Buchanan Hall 1920, which is open to the public. For anyone who wants to celebrate, come to Tupelo Junction restaurant in SB at 6:30pm.

Montana bound

I flew from Berlin to Montana this week and will be based here, working for the next couple of months, before returning to UCSB for teaching in the fall. The summers here are so beautiful, as you might be able to surmise from this photo of a late night sunset in Missoula. My year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin was very interesting and productive. Our end of the year party was last weekend on July 13th, and many of the fellows showcased their talents by participating in original musical compositions, skits, cooking an enormous feast, and by tearing it up on the dance floor into the early morning hours! I will miss many of the fellows and staff at the wissenschaftskolleg, and am grateful to have had this past year of work abroad. I'm glad to be back home, however, and I look forward to making the adjustment here in Montana.

Budapest Seminar on Media Globalization

I am in Budapest for a media globalization seminar at the Central European University organized by faculty at the University of Amsterdam. There are participants from Poland, Hungary, Bellarusse, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Russia, Bulgaria, and Indonesia, among others. It has been a fantastic week here and the participants in the seminar are amazing. We have been discussing post-communism, national identity, media and memory, the expansion of Europe and the EU, and a variety of other topics. We are creating a blog so that participants can post their thoughts and ideas about media research in central and eastern Europe. Here is the url: www.ceumediastudies.blogspot.com

Walking Wireless Workers Installation opens in Ulaanbaatar

On June 26 my walking wireless workers installation opened at the Intersections 3 exhibiton in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The project involved four white phone workers situated at four points in a circle facing outward ready to place calls. To activate the installation I called each of the phones from Berlin, highlighting the integration of the white phones within the global wireless infrastructure and economy. Then I called my translator, Zaya, who was located on site at the installation. He projected my voice on a speakerphone and translated my project introduction into Mongolian before a live audience. I paid each of the white phone operators for 2 hours worth of calls (12,000 tgs) and invited visitors of the installation to use the phones for free and help spread information about the arts and Intersections 3 into the wireless bandwidth. Visitors also had access to a handout about my research project and a web interface where they could view photographs of white phone workers that I shot while conducting research in Ulaanbaatar in 2004 and 2007. They also had the opportunity to ask the white phone operators questions about their work and lives.

Zaya and Ochir, curator of Intersections 3, indicated there was great interest in the installation, particularly among the Mongolians who see these white phone workers each day, but rarely stop to think about their work, lives, use of technology, and participation in the economy. Photos and more info will be posted soon, I hope!

Upcoming Events

On June 26-28th, my White Phone Workers installation will appear as part of the Intersections 3 international art exhibition in Ulaanbaatar. Thanks to Zaya and Ochir for helping to make this happen.

On July 2, I will give a lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin.

From July 4-9 I will be in Budapest at Central European University teaching a graduate student workshop on Media Globalization together with other colleagues from Europe and the US. My students will be doing a field exercise about media in urban space and I am very much looking forward to this! There is more information about the workshop here:
www.sun.ceu.hu/3Courses/descriptions/Media-2007-detailed.pdf

I put some photos of the Naran Satellite Station and White Phone Workers on my flickr site for those who might best interested. www.flickr.com/photos/cosmowink