In this work, I am using cell phones to create a new responsive installation artwork. I am exploring ideologies about embodiment, sentience, identity, and artificial intelligence encompassed in 3G networks.

The cell phones have been programmed to act in a variety of ways, so that sometimes the cell phones appear to be partially interconnected to each other, sometimes completely interconnected, and at other times entirely autonomous.

During a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, I asked seventeen artists to imagine themselves as cell phones. Working together with them, I recorded audio and video for distinct cell phone personalities - one for each of 17 Nokia cell phones that will be used in exhibition. In addition to conversational elements and spoken Facebook entries, each artist found a way to address the fact that as a networked technology they (cell phones) were having a global social and cultural impact.

When not activated by a viewer, each cell phone muses aloud, creating multiple streams of consciousness. When activated by a viewer, a single cell phone can perform a series of individual behaviors to make it appear that it phone is conversing one on one with the viewer. It can also combine with all the other cell phones to appear to be a single entity. As a group consciousness, they have the ability to all speak the same statement in their own particular voice, or to speak the same statement in unison using only one phone's voice. As a group, the phones can laugh, recite poetry, or play a game.  This is a fairly rough example of possible encounter between a cell phone and a female viewer:

I am in the process of prototyping a device that both holds and rotates the cell phone. To relate directly to human scale, each device will be hung at the eye level of the artist that contributed to the audio and video. Hanging it from the ceiling will make each phone appear as a disembodied presence. 

When the phone’s main camera senses someone in its vicinity, the program will trigger an infrared signal for a sensor that is built into the cell phone.  The signal will then be sent to a receiver mounted on a motor driven rotating device. This will cause the cell phone to rotate 180 degrees so that the cell phone's screen faces the person sensed. At the end of the encounter the motor will rotate the phone back 180 degrees to its original position.  The design also allows for limited motion that is picked up by the cell phone's built in accelerometer, making it appear that the phones are responsive if touched.