Definition and mission of the Mobile Media Lab
The Mobile Media Lab (MML) is co-located at York University in Toronto, and in Hexagram, at Concordia University in Montreal The lab is made up of an interdisciplinary research team exploring wireless communications, mobile technologies and locative media practices. MML brings together a unique configuration of expertise in art, design, engineering, new media, cultural theory, social science and policy studies.
Our projects treat physical territory as an active and volatile interface using networked technologies to connect the physical to the virtual.
We have produced projects exploring the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of media rich content for mobile platforms using an assemblage of cell phones, PDAs, GPS systems, custom built Bluetooth sensors, and open source software. Our creative research probes how these subtle technologies augment, enhance, deplete, mediate and foster new sensations of temporality in urban contexts and outdoor spaces.
The following questions shape the collaborative work of the Mobile Media Lab.
- How can an awareness of environmental contexts, social histories and local knowledges influence mobile media use?
- What are some of the social practices, communities and activist agendas that might engage with these technologies?
- What are the material and regulatory contexts shaping the production, distribution and use of mobile practices and wireless technologies?
- How can we push the tensions and boundaries between mobility and immobility, the analogue and the digital, the virtual and the material?
- In what ways are these practices embodied and how might these new media modalities produce new forms of embodiment?
- What are the temporal rhythms that pulsate in this new media ecology?