Mobiles are stars of art-museum show in Germany

By Sandra TraunerHamster Hipster Handy: The baffling title starts to gel with exhibition visitors as they discover how the ‘Handy’, as a mobile phone is called in German, can now lay claim to being an art medium in its own right.Clues to the other title elements lie in the effect this innovation has on users: They are drawn into a comfortable if often narcissistic synergy with their devices through selfies and ‘life-logging’ their waking moments, or are left scrabbling like a hamster to keep up with its demands.“This is a core object of our society, affecting us mentally, physically and emotionally,” says Birgit Richard, professor of new media at Frankfurt University, co-creator of “Hamster Hipster Handy. Under the spell of the mobile phone,” which runs at the city’s Museum of Applied Arts until July 5.  As well as inviting 80 artists to participate, curators from different German cities also scoured the consumer landscape for measures of just how far this ubiquitous device pervades our way of life, thinking and interpretation of the world around us.They found cake cutters in iPhone form, sinister ‘knuckleduster’ cell-phone covers, gloves with inbuilt touch screens, and a hairdresser’s cape with a small window that allows you to tap away in your lap while getting a trim. But these are only a few incidental oddities, not the focal point of the installation.“The smartphone has permeated people’s daily lives in a unique manner,” says Wolfgang Ullrich, professor of media theory in Karlsruhe. A whole raft of what he calls “new cultural rituals” has emerged in under a decade, selfies being the obvious example. But not every self-portrait taken with a cellphone can be considered art. Then again, if Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei documents the essence of his limited existence under that country’s regime, every shot becomes a valid part of the kaleidoscope of his distinct experience. “With new media come new art forms,” concludes Richard of such discrepancies.Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson mounts self-portraits behind splintered phone screens, thereby extracting aesthetic value from accidents. Laurel Nakadate made herself cry every day for a year, chronicling this with a smartphone for her ‘Catalogue of Tears.’Alberto Frigo took a snap of everything he held in his right hand for 12 years and ran the thumbnail shots in a seemingly endless sequence: “life-logging” is the name of this new digital trend.The “head-down generation,” as obsessive and generally young smartphone users are called, is still at home in the real world but also embedded in a peculiar ‘other world’. Apart from frustrating people around them, this too can inspire art, like the 3D figures of Peter Picciani, hunched over their mobiles, there but... not there.The advent of smartphones is fast rendering old-fashioned wrist watches, paper calendars and maps into relics of yesteryear. The devices also determine how we take photos (copiously and indiscriminately), make dates and appointments (fast and short) or how reachable we are — always.But this often stifling immediacy can also stimulate new art forms and techniques. Berlin street artist Sweza (not his real name) glues patches with QR codes (Quick Response codes, or matrix barcodes) around the city so curious passers-by can scan the codes with their phones and see earlier graffiti at the spot that has since been painted over. Bruno Ribeiro uses mock Instagram filters bolted on lampposts and walls to frame real-life street scenes. “Seen critically, you could say [smartphones] dominate and manipulate us,” says Ullrich, who does not own one himself. “On the plus side you could say they socialise us.” Either way, he hopes the exhibition comes across neither “techno-euphoric nor culturally pessimistic.” To help differentiate between these poles, the installations make use of the title concept. The hipster is the affirmative 21st-century consumer, and “represents a new culture of mobile image generation with its seemingly infinite possibilities and the related narcissistic self-presentation,” says the museum.Hamster symbolises the dangers, from possible long-term harmful effects of heavy cellphone use on brain and hearing functions, as was researched using rodents at the start of the noughties.The hamster motif also addresses the device’s electricity requirements, its consumption of resources, surveillance implications, and electronic waste. To illustrate some of these aspects, the exhibition designers use live hamsters on a wheel to power a phone battery. And an interactive game imparts knowledge about rare earth metals used in phone manufacture, and flags the danger of conflict as global competition grows to own these resources. However people view mobile phones, there is no ignoring the way they now shape whole generations, says Richard, adding that art is already challenging this and sociology and science must keep step with this new facet of human existence: “The smartphone is here now — and here to stay.” —DPA