Rome – There are those like the Apple of Cupertino who try to reinvent it to make it a commercial success, and those who invent events to vent the nerves of those who just can’t take it anymore. Certainly the mobile phone, for almost everyone, enthusiasts or detractors, represents more and more a central object of everyday life . So important that it will be at the heart of the exhibition A day without the mobile-phone, a techno-artistic performance under construction as part of Plektrum – The visual sound festival.
The avant-garde event, from 12 to 16 September in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, aims to represent “a bridge towards new technologies with innovative ideas arising from creative minds scattered among the different disciplines”. A day without the mobile-phone, presented by the performers of the Estonian group Eve Arpo and Riin Kranna-Roos, will have the beloved / hated mobile phone as its subject.
The exhibition will be presented in a public space near the church of San Giovanni, where a thousand cell phones donated by the inhabitants of the city will literally be hung and dangled from a tree creating special audio-visual effects .
The purpose of the performance is not a simple critique of the most used (and abused) means of communication of our times, but rather that of involve everyone in an open discussion : spectators could come to the – all too easy – conclusion that the mobile phone is used with unnecessarily excessive frequency, and in this Italy would in fact be in the front row.
But one could surprisingly arrive at the opposite result, looking at one’s mobile phone dangling a few meters from the ground from the distance, and that is that the function of the vehicle is that of substantial utility, whose abuse does not cancel its role as a vital communication link in the information society . To meet the requests of voluntary cell phone donors, 10 public telephone numbers – cell phones, of course – were set up to contact to take part in the exhibition.
Alfonso Maruccia
