ABSTRACT
In the last decade mobile filmmaking appeared in the mediascape and defined new opportunities for digital filmmaking (Schleser 2014). With the rise of smartphones and the proliferation of applications (“apps”), the ways everyday media users and creative professionals represent, experience, and share the everyday is changing. With the overlay of location-based services, such as tagging the GPS coordinates to videos captured on mobile devices, these experiences and representations are providing new social, creative, and cultural cartographies. Smartphones and mobile media have established new forms of creativity, connectivity, and sociability within contemporary media, art and design practices, and, for the first time in history, worldwide mobile technologies provide communities with access to the Internet and innovative ways of sharing knowledge (Berry and Schleser 2014). Mobile cameras also provide a means to navigate through time and space, explore movement and provide opportunities, through montage, to demonstrate changes in environments not visible to us. While aerial cinematography is becoming a current trend through drones, the idea of a mobile screen is less present and developed. This chapter will outline the emergence of micro technologies in the form of mobile, smartphone, pocket cameras and pico-projectors and discuss the creative collaboration Flug Pixel (Schleser and Nevin 2015) that resulted in the development of a mobile screen in the form of a helium balloons with a picco-projector. Flug Pixel is an experiment in exploring mobility in production and exhibition. This project was initiated through our conceptual interest in mobility and the prospects that interrupt the linearity in the production process. As interaction designers and filmmakers, we merged our backgrounds in mobile moving-image practice and spatial installations. Max, who developed creative approaches and methods to use mobile devices and smartphones for moving-image and video production during the last eight years, is interested in further exploring ephemeral media and transcending the moments captured in micro-movies on location into immersive viewing experiences. He montages the first impressions captured on location into abstract micro-movies, which can be screened on mobile devices, tablets, and/or smartphones in any environment. Antony
explores ways in which people’s experiences of each other may be transformed by interactive installations. The creative common denominator in this collaboration is expressed through the creative approach toward mobility and the development of experiences that let us see the world in new ways. Initially mobile camera phones were not developed as a filmmaking tool, but filmmakers, designers, artists, and users of these devices demonstrated applications for diverse creative practices, formats, and new aesthetics. Creative mobile media can not only produce self-representation, but may also lead towards the proliferation of new formats and viewpoints of the world. Weather balloons are generally considered as tools for science, rather than as an aspect of creative media production. However, by bringing together smartphones, picco-projectors, helium-filled weather balloons, Arduino technology and accessing tools in the open source Arduino coding community, creative methods towards the development of micro productions and floating exhibitions can be developed. Nevin’s Beluga (2012) installation was extended to develop novel ways of combining floating screens with mobile video. This has resulted in the initial concept for Flug Pixel. This chapter will explore mobility as creative intervention. It will be used as a visual media production approach and simultaneously as an exhibition format. By expanding our horizons through shifting our viewpoints we are exploring opportunities how to perceive and experience the world in new angles and perspectives. These emerging creative practices are important, as they allow us to see the world beyond the limits of our horizons and allow us to make new connections, creating awareness about issues that we might not recognize otherwise. This chapter focuses on the experiences that the micro-movies create, and how these can be transcended into new environments. Furthermore, this chapter will explore opportunities for new subjective expressions and experiences through creative perspectives that emerged with the proliferation of small-scale cameras and projectors. At the intersection of art and technology, experiences of locations are captured and disseminated through a mobile projection. This conceptual interposition provides new opportunities for shifting perspectives and creating new ways of seeing and sharing experiences. We will base our discussions of mobility within Bergson’s framework of time and movement. As an active entity movement defines experience and is explored as the theoretical underpinning to conceptualize mobility in the context of creative practice production and exhibition processes. Based on this phenomenological approach, we will describe our creative practice linked to the concept of micro productions and floating exhibitions. Movement is a key parameter for the notion of being mobile. By means of using accessible tools in unorthodox ways, innovative formats are explored. This will lead toward thinking about experiences rather than content. In this chapter, Schleser will outline the micro-movies and the application of mobile and smartphone apps for
creative practice on the move and Nevin will describe his aerial spatial installation: Beluga. The chapter will conclude by describing the prototype Flug Pixel that resulted through a symbiosis of mobility and experience.
