Mobile applications, public distribution and Art

Published on Feb. 24, 2009
by Kyle

Ever since iTunes released its app store for the iPhone, my interest in the artistic possibilities of mobile applications has been on the rise. In my mind, this marked the first time that I could possibly develop a project that could be widely distributed and easily used by people in public spaces. The ability to work with the accelerometer and the multi-touch screen also seemed exciting. My enthusiasm was later curbed, as I learned more about Apple’s NDA (which has been lifted) and considered the disadvantages in having to distribute all applications through the iTunes app store, this still strikes me as a huge bottleneck.

My friend Judson Koehn, designed an iPhone application called Pixi, with Tiny Wonder Studios; here in Minneapolis. From talking to him and the developer Jesse, I heard the hassles and the joys of that sort of development. Limitations in its graphics capabilities, and difficulties getting the application to pass Apple’s review team. Now with version 1.0 released (a very complete 1.0 release), it is an application that I enjoy playing around with and has artistic merit. Pixi is a essentially a digital spirograph, you use your fingers to control variables such as radius, stroke width and color and may others. The features in Pixi make it possible to get a large range of results and you can also load preset “Pixi’s” from a default gallery or “PixiNet.”

Generative Applications like Pixi and the network functionality of applications like Ocarina have some interesting possibilities. Northern Lights published the article Non-”FLOS” Public Space and Aesthetic Invention and use Pixi as an example. The writer mentions using similar applications to control the facade of buildings in a local area, ideas like this really deserve more consideration. I’m still not convinced that there is a mobile phone that offers the ideal platform for these experimental projects, but hopefully there will be.