Signs and Traces
Last week in our tutorial we were talking about and experimenting with ringtones. I also did a sound piece made out of approximately 20 ringtones that I could find on my mobile. As I change my ringtone probably not even once per year (right now it is the theme of a computer game called Monkey Island), I don’t have a big selection of them on my phone, it is mostly themes of video games or TV series:
I think the reason why ringtones are important to many people (and therefore, big business) is to ensure themselves of their identity, their individuality. Of course, there is also a practical reason, as it would be more difficult to recognize a phonecall if everyone would use the same ringtone: It is much easier to hear the mobile ring and identify it as our own when we hear a melody that only our phone produces. But nevertheless, I think the mobile phone has probably become a mirror of our identity. The more billions of humans walk this planet, the more we have the need to stand out, to assure ourselves of our individuality, even if individuality has long become an illusion. Instead, we project our identity onto objects: Mobile phones personalized with stickers, bags, jewelry, a unique combination of applications, and of course, a ‘unique’ combinations of ringtones and sounds. The mobile phone has probably replaced the car as the favorite expression of identity.
What I like about the artist Spencer Tunick, who had recently gathered 5500 naked Australians around the opera house in Sydney, is exactly that: Our individuality is an illusion – stripped down to our ‘natural’ state (to what extent our bodies are ‘natural’ is another story), we are all the same. From a few meters distance, it doesn’t matter if fat or thin, long or short hair, red, blonde or brown, or no hair at all, everyone looks as different from one another as two ants in an anthill. It also shows the constructedness of what we consider to be a ‘normal’ appearance in public (the social convention that we wear clothes, shave or cut our hair,…), puts people into an unfamiliar situation and forces them to interact and communicate, to break boundaries (for example, between hetero- and homosexuals). So maybe one could say, this kind of art is if not intercultural, it is at least intracultural, and talks about the interstices within a culture between different sub-cultures.
Reading about relational aesthetics, I had to think of flash mobs, these spontanious gatherings of people doing apparently pointless things. What I like about them is, that they are strictly speaking not different to what a performance artist would do, but they get rid of the artist/audience distinction alltogether. It is neither possible nor desirable to find an ‘artist’ responsible for a certain flash mob. One could probably call it collaborational art, where there is no artist anymore, the audience, the spectators make and become the art.
I also made a few more pictures, that all contain osme sort of sign or trace of something: The hands are another symbol for our identity, as they contain our fingerprints, that are considered to be truly individual; then there is an ‘empty’ street sign with a trace of light of the person who took the photograph (me), and there are two pictures of traces of light on a moving surface, water:
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