WEEK TWO: Auckland (post 3 of 3): MINA 3rd Mobile Creativity & Mobile Innovation Symposium 2013
The Mobile Innovation Network Aotearoa [MINA] creates interactions between people, content and the creative industries http://mina.pro/
This is the final post of three covering ‘WEEK MINA’ (as it shall henceforth be known) – my first week in Auckland and a welcome excursion into all forms of mobile creativity. The main event of the week was the 3rd Mobile Creativity & Mobile Innovation Symposium 2013, organised by Max Schleser and Laurent Antonczak and held at AUT’s stunning Sir Paul Reeves Building.
Now in its 3rd year, the MINA Symposium is gaining a reputation as one of the leading-edge academic events around mobile creativity, with close links to partner mobile film festivals around the world. The 2-day symposium was punctuated by 3 nights of mobile film screenings that I wrote about here.
I was delighted to be invited to the symposium as a keynote speaker along with Prof. Larissa Hjorth from RMIT. This was the first time I’d attended a MINA event, and I was impressed by the diversity of sessions. With key themes of:
- MOBILE & PEDAGOGY / Learning & teaching
- MOBILE & MEDIA PRODUCTION / Distribution & collaboration
- MOBILE & AESTHETIC / iPhonography & filmmaking
- MOBILE & SOUND / Music production & Instruments
- MOBILE & HYBRID ART / Installation
- MOBILE & INTERACTIVITY / Ludification & gamification
- MOBILE & SPACE / Locative media & GPS tagging
- MOBILE & APPlications / Science & Health
Contributions ranged from gaming, interactive film, pedagogy, citizen journalism, film theory, cultural theory, politics, audio (design/art), pedagogy, documentary filmmaking, transmedia, product design – in fact, I kept finding myself thinking ‘(insert colleague/collaborator/twitter contact’s name) should be here. There really is something for everybody at MINA, with the devices in our pockets serving as springboards for an impressively rich range of contributions from pretty much any discipline/field – I was as transfixed and inspired as I am by The Rest Is Noise festival, and that’s saying something…
The full programme is here, but I’ll just pick up on a few (personal) highlights beginning with Hjorth’s keynote, a brilliantly nuanced exploration of social, mobile and locative media signalling a need to focus on emplacement and co-presence rather than the dominant ‘network’ metaphor in visual/media and internet studies. Mobile, movement and geolocated production practices were recurrent themes (as you’d expect), with Hjorth’s keynote followed by Trudy Lane and Halsey Brugund’s audioscapes – which being based in acoustics/audio I found especially interesting – and Candy Elsemore’s mobile location-based augmented reality gaming, which resonated with me from the perspective of engagement through alternate realities and pedagogies.
Lorenzo Dalvit’s focus on camphones as devices for capturing events as they happen was a sobering unfiltered view of the inhumaneness of an oppressive regime. Showing footage that captured police brutality in South Africa, Dalvit highlighted the role of the devices in our pockets as tools for citizen journalism – a theme also picked up by Ben Lenzner who highlighted the work of Tim Pool and the community-activist group India Unheard.
In terms of mobile aesthetics, there were several notable sessions from practitioners/theorists/practitioner-theorists including Patrick Kelly, Dean Keep, Craig Hight and Felipe Cardona. I loved Miriam Ross’ session on ‘The New Vertical’. Ross set up the Vertical Cinema Manifesto as a response to the anti-vertical PSA-spoof (and related) vids that were doing the rounds online. Making the case that this in itself is a form of policing, Ross is calling for us to fight for our right to go vertical. Whatever you think about the horizontal vs. vertical debate (personally, I’m a big fan of the idea of vertical – although I don’t always find it comfortable to watch), it’s important to recognise industry-led convention and to keep questioning, exploring and innovating. Why should film always be horizontal? What about vertical, round, etc? Don’t they have a place too? I always find it interesting when we’re working with students on 24F24H, seeing how many people reject outright the vertical – because that’s how it is, that’s how it’s done, “there’s this study that says…” Ross’ work is timely, needed and refreshing.
Heloukee: EdTech and Digital Culture 