Phone/Sex/Video

I've been thinking about cellphones since I read Cellular Phones As Sexual Objects And Human Implosion by Emily Lacy

The cell phone represents a human desire to connect with others, to be sexual and capable of sex anywhere. There are no boundaries anymore; we can talk 'til the end of the world. I am continually confronted with my sexuality because the cell phone is a signifier of my sexual and social life, which has now become somehow more unbearably "endless". The portability of the phone allows for a constant intercourse of communication, and it is done via a machine.

Now, I want a cellphone.


Encoded Presence [auto-portrait of E. Puente]
Michael Takeo Magruder [02.2005]

Michael Takeo uses a smartphone to create lo-tech video portraits of his subjects and releases the results in three formats: standard computer, PDA and Smartphone. The resulting video is highly pixelated. I'm not sure that I like the standard computer version (the image is blown up and there is an annoying audio component in both the standard computer and PDA versions) but the smartphone version works on my computer (Mac) and is truer to the source.

...Generating transitory and ephemeral networks, the mobile phone mediates our most intimate of communications and exchanges – at all times and in all places – and continues to erode the actual and perceived divisions between public and private space.

Within this technological and sociological framework, there exists the potential to implement this medium as a mechanism to explore, critique and expand the conceptual and aesthetic structures within the classical genre of portraiture...

Without artistic direction/interference and utilising only a SVP c500 smartphone as a recording instrument, a subject was requested to generate cinematic content interpreting the notion of ‘auto-portrait’. From the resulting material a single nine second audio/video stream was extracted and utilised as the exclusive source material for the artwork.