The Mobile Multimedia Phone and Artistic Expression: A Case Study of Moby Click

Abstract

The mobile multimedia phone is often talked about in terms of the existing media that can be used with it. Press coverage, marketing, and users themselves report that the phone can be used as a digital camera (still or video), as a tape recorder, for playing games, or for making postcards, to mention a few possibilities. According to media researchers Bolter and Grusin, it is characteristic for new digital media to remediate, that is to mimic, assemble, and sometimes improve older, existing media. Seen in this light, the mobile multimedia phone can be called a remediator. The multimedia phone provides an advanced version of, for example, the camera, by adding to it the possibility of instantly sending pictures to and with others (Bolter and Grusin, 1999; for more discussion on the mobile multimedia phone as a remediator, see Colombo and Scifo in this volume.) On the other hand, the use of mobile multimedia can be regarded as a form of communication that has characteristics of its own. Using the mobile multimedia phone is, in the end, different from taking photographs, making home videos, or sending postcards. The reasons for using it are difficult to reduce to the reasons for using other media. And the culture that surrounds mobile multimedia is different from that which surrounds other media. In other words, the mobile multimedia phone as an object, product and technology, as well as mobile multimedia communication as a phenomenon and act, carries different meanings to users than using, for example, a digital camera or an ordinary mobile phone. In the Moby Click case study, both of the above views appear and intersect. In the case study interviews, the nine art students who used mobile multimedia in