The contributors of Mobile Minded are pioneering a new critical discourse. There is no mobile phone theory, yet. While you read and browse, the vocabulary is in the making. The question raised here still is one of bewilderment and excitement. What is the mobile condition?

Will visual culture disappear in the future and will we instead, for instance, use our ears to experience beauty and excitement? Now that globalisation has brought us worldwide visual inflation, we are closing our eyes and opening up other senses and exploring new parts of the body. The question then becomes: will we get a similar imagery delivered on our mobile devices, this time embedded in our bodies? Does it really make sense to repeat the telephone, radio and television culture of the twentieth century, this time in a matchbox?

The current situation concerning wireless technologies seems to be ambivalent. Whereas the use of mobile phones worldwide seems unstoppable and continues to grow in an unprecedented pace, the involvement of artists seems to grow rather more slowly. It seems hard to go beyond the level of ordinary consumer.

However, over the past few years we have seen a gradual rise in arts projects which use ‘cellspace’ as their communication environment. Who else are promoting mobile phone projects in order to shape a rich and diverse public space within this highly commercial, and controlled virtual environment? The so far problematic relationship between the more or less free internet environment and the highly edited information stream accessible via mobile devices is certainly a controversial topic which is not going to be resolved overnight.

Mobile technology has liberated objects from their serfdom. Objects are no longer bound to a determined locality. Instead of staying behind when we go on the move, the techno objects are accompanying us in an almost unconscious manner. Mobile phones express an ambivalent relationship towards locality.
While mostly used nearby home and the workplaces, cellphones are also part of global information systems.
We carry PDAs and mobile phones of our choice close to our body as if they were our most intimate friends. Often, people don’t even get that close, compared to the invasiveness of ‘wearable’ technologies. They are truly becoming ‘extensions of man’, as Marshall McLuhan once described media. As cyborgian fetishes for the masses, the tiny electronics navigate us through our busy everyday lives. They assist us finding the right information ecology ( whose call to answer, who to block, which SMS to answer). They help us to beat boredom. Handy phones and portable web browsers reflect the global condition of electronic herds of hyper individual subjects as ‘projects’ (Vilem Flusser). Always on the move, always accessible, 24/7, on every possible spot you can imagine.

The other side of techno-mobility is the liberating dimension of Becoming Mobile. To operate ‘ mobile minded’ gives us the possibility to freely move around, question authority and predetermined behaviour. Freedom of movement is an essential human right and with it comes the possibility to leave behind conservative frameworks which try to stick us to one place and one position, one ideology, thereby preventing people to design their own mindset.

Mobile freedom can be reached in a ‘negative’ move in order to defend individual liberty. Liberty means liberty from, and in this context this means the freedom to define ones own technology standards, beyond the phraseology of ‘consumer choice’. Technological liberty is a negative. In the act of warding off interference of global telco corporations and their willing government executors, mobile-minded users are shaping their own awareness of digital aesthetics.