VINN Excellence Centre 2007-2017
Mobile Life
The documentary about the Mobile Life Centre, its people, foundation and impact.
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Delete by Haiku is a mobile phone application that explores how deleting old text messages can become an enjoyable and creative practice by turning messages into haiku poetry. Through the application users interactively repurpose selected old text messages on their mobile phone into a haiku poem aided by a haiku- generating algorithm. By repeatedly pinching the selected messages they break apart into words that tumble down in a Tetris like manner. Gradually words are deleted until the remaining words find their position and form a haiku.
The video presents a walkthrough of how to interact with the application to select messages in various ways, how to apply ‘themes’ to gain some control over the generation process, and eventually share created poems with others through social media.
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To think of how one could go about exploring deletion, we met with communities dedicated to Haiku poetry. This traditional Japanese form of poetry is marked by a three-line structure, where the syllables per line are, in order 5-7-5. What inspired us in Haiku was two-fold. First it represents a compressed form of text, which helped our thinking on deleting (or compressing) large amounts of text (the SMSs). And secondly, being a well-known aesthetic practice, it motivates us to think about deleting as an aesthetic process, and not necessarily the painful, “trash can” association it has in digital systems.
To explore these ideas, we organized a workshop around Haiku making. With 10 participants, during an afternoon, we explored how to build different Haiku poems, from certain given elements, such as newspapers, books, images and different objects. The exercises had a strong focus on aspects of uncontrolled deleting, for example, by the partial burning of a newspaper page, and working with whatever was left. By doing that, one forces the participants to give up some of the control over their Haiku making, and working within these constraints.
“Delete by Haiku” asks questions on the usage of personal data like storing SMS messages and critically proposing to apply defamiliarised concepts of creating through deletion, also involving practices of letting go, create by loose, and recycling of data. To approach such results we were inspired by human memory and forgetting paradigm as well as in comparing phenomena of digital deletion with human forgetting. Taking approaches from art history and art practice we were inspired by destructive art, ephemeral approach and literature, in particular haiku – traditional Japanese poetry technique.
By exploring defamiliarised concepts we apply translation strategies, which result in compression and condensing of data, and contribute in abstraction and generalisation of stories in SMS messages. This implies issues on personalization through levels of abstraction and some issues of privacy in sharing personal data publicly.
Translation is projected in many ways, and another one is how the data is translated into a smaller form. And in haiku technique smaller amount of information opens up a space for interpretation. It is also referring to condensing data in a fragmented way and changing the story through non-linear approach.
But also through the digital creative process we turn to qualifying-self approach as opposition to a well-known quantified-self movement, which implies similar problems on storing and managing data, but here we offer a curatorial practice of personal data. And after downloading and using the app, it informs how people’s experiences change according to their writing behaviours of SMS messages.
www.DeleteByHaiku.com Play Video + Shrink Video -
After 10 years of research in the joint venture of Mobile Life we have come to the end of the road. This is the end of Mobile Life as we know it and the beginning of everything else! Play Video + Shrink Video -