Dominick Chen

Q1. The mobile media continues to technologically evolve. How do you think such evolution will modify our body senses?

Q2. This question is slightly related to the previous one, but people in the future who are forced to be associated with the ever-advancing mobile technology will probably be required to acquire senses and skills suitable for facing the technology. What will such senses and skills, namely the literacy in the broad term, become? Please let us know your opinions on this.

Dominick Chen

Photo by Joi Ito

I'm answering both questions by linking my answer to the first one. To go right to the point, our becoming-cyborg (devenir-cyborg, a la Deleuze) leads us to share every internal process including our physical motions and state that are now externalized (sampled). As a result, real-world- oriented lifelog sensing and analysis technologies would converge with socially oriented myware and micro-blogs blossoming in today's WWW. As we incarnate mobile media, the self prochronism (archival record of our own growth that create a pattern to connect with other, c.f. Gregory Bateson) as digital information would cause a feedback to our daily consciousness. The next generation of activism and media literacy will depend on whether this situation could trigger a shift in information production, going from a communication based on discrete data to a continuous exchange of long-term processes.

Q3. What kinds of contact will art and mobile media have in the future, do you think? If you know any interesting art projects using mobile media (or your own activities having some kind of contact), please introduce them to us.

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer's "amodal suspension - relational architecture 8" (2003) or Usman Haque's "Open Burble" (2006) presented a concrete situation where mobile media interact with environments rendered 'intelligent'. Nevertheless, precisely because these are designed as art projects, however spectacular they may be, these search light (Lozano-Hemmer) or ballons (Haque) are only ephemeral situations.

Rather than focusing on art as temporal framework, I am more interested in building systems that interact with our surrounding environment on a longer time scale, in order to literally innovate our daily lives. Today, the asynchronous communication mode enabled by the Web technologies is more and more connecting with our real-world communication (human to human and human to environment).

In order to go further in this direction, we will first of all need to create a social consensus on the re-definability of our environment. As one of the means to pursue this goal, I am currently working on spreading a legal framework that is called Creative Commons Public License. In the next decade, the borderlines drawn by proprietaries of material spaces would gradually fade away in certain public areas. Most of all, it is a primordial cultural priority to start building a public platform in the physical realm that propels multi-derivative chains of information creations based on peer-produced Free, Libre and Open Contents that are open aforetime to each other's modification.

Q4. A great deal of trial and error has been made by companies and people related to the mobile media, such as cell phones and PDA, to conceptualize a society in which such media is being widely disseminated. What do you think that a near-future society where mobile media is widespread will be? Please let us know in as specific terms as possible.

Unless open redefinability is guaranteed, bodies fitted with networked computing functionalities as complementary exteriority - cyborgs - would only emerge as mass-slaves fulfilling market-driven routines determined by a handful of masters in a society that is struck by a now physical digital divide. Each individual's lifelog (or generation history) is constantly emitted to the Net from their bodily actions, and individual uniqueness shrinks as it is traded off in favor of security and convenience. Whereas real-world information is massively exchanged through the Net, on the other hand, the society shares information that are materialized from the Net to the real-world. The self-information (alter-ego) built on the Net constitutes a mirror-relationship with the complementary body in the real-world, and the coupling creates a continuous persistent world. In other terms, the Internet as the extension of human perception finally concretizes, and the informational war of all against all expands to the physical layer.

Q5. How is mobile media used in the country (region) where you live? Please let us know the characteristics that you have noticed through your daily life or problems that your society has faced. How do you utilize mobile media?

I use a smart phone (Willcom, Sharp W-ZERO-3, first generation) to record daily notes and agenda, shoot photographs, browse text/PDF documents more than using it as a phone (Skype, Twitter and iChat is forming a better communication platform for me somehow). This means I'm constantly expecting that my phone acts with (almost) the same performance as my MacBookPro. Or should I say that the coupling of my smart phone and my laptop forms my mobile media.

Although, I do not think that a lifestyle in which people actively transmit their information (especially from their mobile environments) has gained sufficient currency yet, smart phones such as iPhone or OpenMoko are getting close to the PC's malleability of information. And, recalling that even active commiters on the Internet are only constituting under 10% of the totality of its users, smart phones will remain as modern charms serving to keep the connectedness (A.Kitada) and filter/transmit only 'useful' and 'safe' information unless interfaces and modes for a more subconscious creativity are actively proposed. In order to promote a cultural evolution in this context, we will have to think more seriously about the meaning brought by our networked physicalities in order to build a mobile media that assists our transmissions of information rather than mere reception.