MobiSpray was this year shown at Art Basel - but not in the traditional way as all the other artworks were, no, I hi-jacked the event and put it up in guerilla manner, in the MobiLenin style. Check out some of my trophies below. I’ll put up a video a bit later. I found the Art Basel this year highly inspiring and really worth visiting. I met many interesting people and had good talks.
Spraying outdoors on the huge frontside of the Art Basel Exhibition main hall. Yes, it was done by me.
Every evening I painted the citiy of Basel in some location that I was tempted to change into the looks as I want it. Here, I painted at the Marktplatz.
This is in some quater in the city centre somewhere.
Reuters.com news - the source for breaking news videos and top stories, showing video clips about business, technology, sports and entertainment - has featured MobiSpray on their website via a 1min 22sec. video. Reuters Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan captured Jürgen Scheible (’MobiLenin’) demoing MobiSpray at the Mobile World Congress MWC 2009 in Barcelona, Spain, where he also interviewed Black Eyed Peas singer will.i.am and Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey (can be seen here in a separate video).
I love it to be able to make my environment look as I want it to be. It is liberating. Because of this I started to embrace the cities and places I go these days much more than I ever did. It is fascinating to be able to change the looks of my reality. I feel the world is giving me a lot - it inspires me, heavily. And I want to turn this inspirational energy into something new, unexpected, kicking - my MobiSpray paintings.
During the last few weeks I had the chance to travel to New York, Melbourne, Sydney, London and Vancouver. And to give you a quick overview of my creations in various places, I put up here a few collages up. Enjoy!
From left upper corner: Vancouver: Siwash rock Stanley park, Science world,Waterfront buildings, Canada place, At gallery, London Smartphone show party.
From left upper corner: Sydney Potts point neighborhood, Federation Square Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, London Big Ben, Parliament house, Tate Modern museum London.
The best ever mobispraying that I did so far was the Guggenheim museum in New york. It had the right size, is purly white and is completely dark at night. But above all it has such a fascinating shape that it makes you wanna mobispray forever.
Ever want to repaint your neighbor’s house? Or pet polar bear? MobiSpray allows light-based painting by using a mobile phone as spray can. With only a phone and a surface you can paint anywhere, anytime on anything. The spray-painting follows your hand gestures in real-time, while spraying intensity and color change via keypad. Whether you are in the woods or the city MobiSpary lets you paint BIG. And, the freedom to intentionally change your surroundings at the scale of your choosing opens doors of creativity and imagination. Turn your reality into something new, unexpected, surprising and unpredictable.
Check this video to see how MobiSpray works:
Find many other videos and photos of SprayingSessions from this blog via the side bar on the right.
When I was in Taiwan in August to teach there, I had to visit the world famaous UFO houses at Sanjhih, north of Taipei - since it was closeby where we stayed - in ‘uncle Lee’s house’. My greatest wish was to MobiSpray on the UFO houses, and so I did or lets say we did. I invited a few friends from the MIT Media Lab with whom I stayed with in Taiwan to come with me.
Watch the video:
And we had an extraordinary experience. When we entered the site the wind was blowing strangely and strong, but also the grass made loud noises caused by the wind. And of course it was dark, since it was night as we wanted to use MobiSpray to make some UFO houses look as we wanted them to be. For one of our Taiwanese fellow girl it become too eerie after a short time, so she left. The rest of us set up the gear and we started spraying - and it was totally exiting to mobispray on this weirdly, but nicely designed UFO houses.
I learned originally about the UFO houses a few days before leaving to Taiwan through an article in the German online magazin Spiegel: http://einestages.spiegel.de. Title of the article was ‘Die Geisterstadt der Außerirdischen’ meaning the ghost city of the aliens. And of course the shape of the UFO-houses was something I had to try out as canvas for MobiSpray.
When I was teaching at the nightmarket workshop 2008 in Tainan, Taiwan during August 2008, which was organized by my friend Jackie Lee, I mobisprayed together with my Taiwanese students. And this occasion has opened my eyes for new uses of MobiSpray: You can make something to look beautiful that is normally perceived as ugly or not worth looking at.
We were spraying on trash that was lying in the hallway of the workshop building. After we went through a fantastic spraying session in shich my students were spraying, too some of them said: ‘For me, the trash has become my treasure!’. A comment that hits a point of what Mobispray can do.
Watch the video:
If I would find a sponsor, I would be interested to organise a huge spraying session with a group of people in some neighborhood somewhere the world that is perceived as ugly and then turn it into something beautiful using Mobispray, at least for a short while - imagine an entire district of a slum could become a pearl! If anyone would have sponsorhip interest for such an activity,
The last Spraying session during our MobiSpray Summer tour 2008 took place in Kuopio. From a previous visit to Kuopio, I remembered seeing a MIG 19 on display close to the Rissilä airbase. This object should be the final highlight of having sprayed on over 15 objects during the previous few weeks.
It has been a fantastic experience to develop, test and deploy Mobipsray during this MobiSpray summer 2008 tour. It gave me lots of insights what MobiSpray is about and what it can become. I would like to thank at this point the UBILife research project and especially Prof. Timo Ojala for his support.
Watch the video:
During our Mobispray summer tour 2008 we had the chance to get a true Lapland experience of fishing, picking cloud berries and going for a barbecue by boat when we got invited by Prof. Timo Ojala to a small village near Kemijärvi.
In the evening we decided that we want to mobispray on a rapid in a remote location that was about 1 hour away by rowing boat. We packed all MobiSpray gear inside the boat - including the power generator, the Lpatop, projector, wifi router, cables and my mobile phone - and then we listened to ducks, birds and the ‘entire quietness’ of Lapland while rowing towards the Rapid.
Watch the video:
At the location there was a suspension bridge over the Rapid, which allowed me to install the projector in such a way that its light went straight down into the moving water. I was exited to see how it looks to mobispray on water. Since it was a Rapid, many parts of the water were white, which revealed great textures. While the water was continuously moving the sprayed colour always remained on the same spot. It appeared on one hand like a film that plays, on the other hand it was also a static image.
Having painted in the water for a while we tried to MobiSpray on trees which gave an interesting appreance, too
After a great barbecue prepared by Prof. Timo Ojala near the rapid, we rowed back and did some line fishing, unfortunately being unlucky of getting any fish.
In Kajaani, north of Finland I spotted a huge grain storage building with a grey-brown surface. So far, I hadn’t spray-painted on huge buildings yet and this was a good opportunity to do it. I thought it is best to leave my video projector inside the car and when I had to park the car quite far from the building in order to cover the entire building surface with the projector light, I only then realized how big the building really is .
Watch the video:
After I spray-painted the first few lines, I suddenly felt how powerful it is to spray on such a huge building with MobiSpray. Just within minutes you can change the appearance of the entire building. This was an experience I never had before. It feels, one has the power over this building. Even if you don’t have keys for it, and are not the owner of the building, still one can decide how this whole thing should look like. This means with Mobispray one can change one’s surroundings and turn them into something surprising, exiting and unexpected - at least temporarily.
This triggered also the thought in my head, that with MobiSpray one can gain access to objects for turning them into something new. One can go beyond a fence or a closed yard, even overcoming height is not a problem, meaning you can enter with MobiSpray where you normally wouldn’t be able to enter at all. This made me think that wouldn’t it be interesting to mobispray on an entire neighborhood one day, and turn it into something completely new?
