Mobile Exposure Mobile Video and Art Festival 3: "Life in the Global Village"

Since their emergence, cellular and mobile technologies have been reshaping the world landscape. In developing countries, cellular networks are spreading through remote areas such as rural Southeast Asia and Amazonia, connecting more and more of humanity to McLuhan's "Global Village" of networks and communications. However, with the increasing closeness to one another, we inevitably become part of one another's lives. There is intimacy, community, and connectedness, but also the creation of a culture where we potentially never leave the office, with our lives perpetually watched and put on social networking sites.

The theme of this year's Mobile Exposure is "Life in the Global Village", where we ask what it means to live in a world where mobile technologies continue to put us in increasingly closer proximity to one another, other places, and other cultures. Love, community, global connectedness, as well as surveillance, the eternal workplace, and the expanding social net are only some of the possibilities that we encourage for entries for this year's Mobile Exposure.

Mobile Exposure is teaming up with NYC-based New Media arts organization Intelligent Agent in offering a special prize for Interactive Art for Cellular Phones. As cellular phones are increasingly becoming less like traditional phones and more like portable computers, interactive art will increasingly become part of the mobile experience. For this reason, Intelligent Agent has offered to support an Interactive Art category for the Mobile Exposure festival to promote new works for the nomadic screen.

JUDGES/CURATORS
Lucas Bambozzi
ME has invited noted Brazilian curator Lucas Bambozzi. Lucas is a multimedia artist, documentarist and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. His works are constituted by authorial and independent pieces, including a wide variety of formats, such as installations, single channel videos and interactive projects. His works have been shown in solo and collective exhibitions in more than 40 countries, often collecting relevant awards and prizes. Lucas has curated exhibitions using mobile media pieces for events such as SonarSound (2004); Nokiatrends (2005) and Motomix Art & Music Festival (2006). He is one of the curators and organizers of the arte.mov Mobile Media Art International Festival (www.artemov.net).

Patrick Lichty
ME is also happy to announce the continued involvement of media artist Patrick Lichty with the festival. Lichty is a Professor of Interactive Art and Media at Columbia College Chicago, animator for the activist group The Yes Men, and a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow of the Arts. He has also shown at numerous venues, and is currently part of the Ars Electronica touring exhibition in Europe.

Casey Reas
For this year's Interactive Art competition, ME is happy to have Casey Reas as one of the festival's Interactive Art component. Reas is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. His work employs ideas explored in conceptual and minimal artworks as focused through the contemporary lens of software. He exhibits, performs, and lectures in the US, Asia, and Europe. As an associate professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, Reas interacts with undergraduate and graduate students. His classes provide a foundation for thinking about software as a medium for visual
exploration.

PRIZES

Video Entries:
Grand Prize - $5,000 Cash prize

Interactive Art:
The Intelligent Agent Prize for Mobile Interactive Art will be a cash prize of $500.

ENTRY FORMATS:
Video:
This year, Mobile Exposure is seeking to address the expanding world of mobile media, as this will be the first year in which ME will begin to offer selections from the festival as Podcast and PSP video as well as 3GP video. Therefore, ME is accepting works made by mobile devices, for mobile devices, or about mobile culture in most digital video formats, including 3GP, Quicktime, MPEG, and AVI. Please submit a format that we will be able to easily convert to other formats for multi-platform distribution. Entries that cannot be read/accessed for conversion will not be accepted.

Interactive Art:
All works that operate on WAP, J2ME, Mobile Processing, and Mobile Flash are encouraged, although all works that operate on newer-generation cell phones are accepted. The only criteria for entries is that provisions should be made to ensure that the curatorial panel be able to view the works, and that the work can be offered for exhibition on the ME website.