IMMobile Phone

Interactive Art but also useful!

Our first main brief of the second year was to create some 'Interactive Art', my first idea was a robot parrot, which with mechanics would turn towards people and answer questions, unfortunately it was already on the market from Hasbro, in a much simpler and less fun form. Originality is one of my aims on this course so the parrot got kicked into touch, it was a Dead Parrot.

After much thinking and research into art and artists that I enjoy, I decided on doing a giant mobile phone, the mobile phone has been getting steadily smaller over the years and turning that around appealed to me. Rene Magritte's "Treachery of Images" also has a big influence on me and when the title of this piece, "IMMobile Phone" came to me I realised that it was a cunning play on Magritte's work, as although my painting of a mobile is not a mobile phone, in the way that his pipe is not a pipe, the fact that my 'phone' can be used as a phone appealed to me. Here is an image of me on screen talking to my kids while I was away recently in Singapore, it was great being able to use a piece of art to interact with my kids, who I missed terribly.

My daughter, MDS, nearly 6 years old at the time, was able to use the phone easily, quality user testing that is. While at times during the last few months of 2009 I was worried that it wouldn't work, so I created a snappier (?) piece called "Three Blind Mice" in the hope that it would only take a short while and give me electronics experience to analogue a keyboard onto this piece. It didn't so I didn't.

I used Times New Roman as the font for the letters, I reckon that it looks good, I know that it works well and I am more than a little chuffed with the whole project. Feel free to contact me if you would like more details.