mobile-mentary @ FILMOBILE

The mobile-mentary project was featured in the FILMOBILE networking event, as the first feature film conceptualised for simultaneous viewing on mobile devices and on the silver screen in a cinematic experience. The mobile-mentary project will premiere in April 2008 at the FILMOBILE conference.

FILMOBILE is a project which aims to create a dialogue between the industry, filmmakers and artists working with mobile devices through a variety of on and off line events. The FILMOBILE exhibition and conference will explore the cultural impact brought about by new mobile technologies and will take place at the University of Westminster in London.



www.filmobile.net

mobile-mentary @ Cultural Studies Now

In the Deleuze panel at the Cultural Studies NOW conference, Max outlined a continuum between the mobile-mentary project, Tokyo’s cityscape and the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. Max drew upon Berhard Kellermann’s 1912 publication Ein Spaziergang in Japan (a walk in Japan) and linked the contemporary Japanese mobile phone user to the modern flâneuse (woman walker) and flâneur. Both explore the city as a time-space network. The mobile phone user guides her/himself through the global city and via i-mode s/he guide him/herself through the everday life and the online world. (In Japan the mobile phone has established itself in the domain of the everyday; more emails are send via mobile phones than computers). Moreover Max pointed at the Lettresists’ and the Situationists’ notions of dérive and détournement, which formed a basis for the concept of psychogeography. In addition Max described the parallelism between the mobile-mentary prodction-process and psychogeography, which is also reflected in Tokio’s city structures. The mobile-mentary project and the city itself represent a time and space construct, in which “any multiplicity is connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.24) The rhizomatic characteristics of discontinuity, rupture, multiplicity, contiguity and immediacy (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.17) define the montage between the filmic-space and the cityscape. The new mobile montage, the viewing of micro-movies in the streets “connects any point to any other point.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.23). And consequently creates a fusion between the filmic and the diegetic spheres.

mobile-mentary @ FUTURE FILM

26 June 2007 @ Future Film session, Westbourne Studios, London

mobile-mentary @ CREAM

In the CREAM symposium presentation on the 21st June 2007, I presented the current research stage of the mobile-mentary project. I created this neologism to emphasize the convergence of mobile technologies and documentary practice. The mobile-mentary research project is an experiment in cinematic communication.

The documentary / city film production The mobile-mentary – the record of a vblog (working title, Schleser, 2007 in post-production) is exploring Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone. The practice-led research project investigates how the mobile-mentaries (mobile documentaries) contribute to and extend the definition of documentary theory and practice.

During the presentation I drew upon Hans Richter’s approach to documentary filmmaking and his conceptualisation of the montage technique. Furthermore I focused on contextualising a new emerging mobile filmic experience, which I illustrated as a ‘link’ between the contemporary cityscape and micro-movies viewed on mobile devices. Moreover I argued the case that the interdependency between cinema and the city is transferred into the mobile realm. In 2000 the first camera phone was introduced in Japan and the last years are characterised by a vast accelerated technological development of mobile devices. Despite the wide diffusion of mobile technologies (-in 2006 mobile phones have outnumbered the volume of film and digital cameras combined-) no examination of the distinctive mobile phone aesthetic is present.