Agent Mobile
AGENT MOBILE: A Performance in 3 Acts
...Let your phone be transformed into Agent M. Remain with your body and release your phone into a world of adventure…
Agent Mobile The foundation of this work is the emerging interface(s) between the body, geographical location, information & communication, and imaging technologies. From satellite super-cameras, to ubiquitous CCTV in nearly all urban centres, to the viral proliferation of mobile phones and their “eyes-wide-open” panoptic vision, surveillance of persons, their actions, and their locations has never been more complete. While these devices may induce literary references to George Orwell’s 1984, it is my intention to follow the metaphors so charmingly established by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. It is the disarming and very innocent appeal (seduction or lure) of Alice’s adventures that is tellingly reflected in the surreptitious proliferation of observation technologies today. Perhaps we have collectively and unwittingly fallen down the rabbit hole into a dream-world where our ability to interpret and respond to our technologies and discover the myriad implications of their promised “wonderland” is still far too naïve.
The tensions and slippery distinctions between the real and the imaginary, the rapidly changing rules of social behaviour, and the instabilities of personal and community identity are all at play in Carroll’s stories and resonate today in profoundly relevant ways. I am interested in the shifts in presence of the user and the prosthetic extension enabled by mobile devices and their “looking-glass” portals. What of the residual body that remains to navigate physical space? The dislocated self that travels into and through the looking glass of the mobile device? Our devices watch and record it all.
The project evolves over several performances in which I transform (commission) a person’s mobile phone into “Agent M”. Under my care (aka The Handler), the agent goes out into the world to undertake and document a “mission” on behalf of its person (aka The Wish-maker). The performance becomes a new “app” that interrupts a person’s habitual relationship to their phone and reinvents mobile devices as characters and agents in the world.
Prototype performances undertaken while in residence at The Banff Centre , 2010.
...Let your phone be transformed into Agent M. Remain with your body and release your phone into a world of adventure…
Agent Mobile The foundation of this work is the emerging interface(s) between the body, geographical location, information & communication, and imaging technologies. From satellite super-cameras, to ubiquitous CCTV in nearly all urban centres, to the viral proliferation of mobile phones and their “eyes-wide-open” panoptic vision, surveillance of persons, their actions, and their locations has never been more complete. While these devices may induce literary references to George Orwell’s 1984, it is my intention to follow the metaphors so charmingly established by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. It is the disarming and very innocent appeal (seduction or lure) of Alice’s adventures that is tellingly reflected in the surreptitious proliferation of observation technologies today. Perhaps we have collectively and unwittingly fallen down the rabbit hole into a dream-world where our ability to interpret and respond to our technologies and discover the myriad implications of their promised “wonderland” is still far too naïve.
The tensions and slippery distinctions between the real and the imaginary, the rapidly changing rules of social behaviour, and the instabilities of personal and community identity are all at play in Carroll’s stories and resonate today in profoundly relevant ways. I am interested in the shifts in presence of the user and the prosthetic extension enabled by mobile devices and their “looking-glass” portals. What of the residual body that remains to navigate physical space? The dislocated self that travels into and through the looking glass of the mobile device? Our devices watch and record it all.
The project evolves over several performances in which I transform (commission) a person’s mobile phone into “Agent M”. Under my care (aka The Handler), the agent goes out into the world to undertake and document a “mission” on behalf of its person (aka The Wish-maker). The performance becomes a new “app” that interrupts a person’s habitual relationship to their phone and reinvents mobile devices as characters and agents in the world.
Prototype performances undertaken while in residence at The Banff Centre , 2010.