Mojobaby.com Rethinking Blogs

Mojobaby.com, a cellular content collective start-up company, serves as facilitator for this online exhibition.  The company’s website allows users to upload cell phone photography and videos to mojobaby.com’s company servers, myspace.com, or other blog sites.

Artists and musicians were invited to create his or her own virtual portfolio site for this exhibition. I have also curated the virtual exhibition, displaying selected works on my educational website, http://robertmartin-edu.info/cal_state_la/luckman_gallery.html.

Visitors/participants will discover that while utilizing one of the three computers to select art works to view, they are actually directing the telematic experience.  Three video projectors show visitor/participants’ selected art works on the gallery walls.  The art works become interactive, as projected images affect, and are affected by, someone else in physical space.   

The artist Roy Ascott coined the term ‘telematic art’, ascribing it to the creation of a computer-mediated telecommunications network, using telecommunications as an artistic medium.  In 1922, the Hungarian constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy created the ground-breaking work Telephone Pictures.

Moholy–Nagy's Telephone Pictures was made in Berlin via the processes of modern technology: Moholy–Nagy dictated the paintings' specifications by telephone, a relatively new invention at the time, to the foreman of a sign factory. Three paintings were made, each with identical images, but of different sizes. The telephone allowed Moholy–Nagy to produce work independent not just of his own hand, but also without his presence. His use of ordinary laborers to perform the work demonstrated his commitment to a non–elitist approach to creative work.

This installation will hopefully encourage a mediated embrace of a message that is not fundamentally about technology.