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Text- FM workshop
by Graham Harwood
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Text-FM by Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, UK
SMS as a medium is primarily used for private, person-to-person messaging. Its use is intimate, often involving speedy exchanges of messages. It is a realm of seduction, slogans and rapid-fire poetry. Opening up this torrent of language arising from thousands of 'cellular-bubbles', the private space of the cell phone produces a mutant take on public art. Text-FM contains both individual voices and many voices, dialogues with itself and with its wider social context.
The key to this project is in gaining a sense of the city as a multi-voiced conversation: non-stop, multiplicate, refractory and inherently live. But it is a city with a twist. It is an open city. The inherent qualities of the media systems, which are hooked together, FM radio, speech synthesis, text, SMS, keypad, and their locations and modes of use, provide the formal qualities of the work. On the other hand the social, cultural and other networks and structures, which they are interfaced with through the project's users produce their expression.
Text-FM creates new shapes and dynamics of communication, opening them up to critical and participatory speculation. No aesthetic filters are imposed outside of those generated by the amalgamation of these media systems. There is no representation of the city except by the city and its informal double, of live words and strange signals.
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