Heidi Tikka

media artist, researcher

Urban Spaces and Experience Design USED project / m-cult and HIIT; UIAH Media Lab

Performing Families - On Situated and Techno-Affective Practices of Mobile Intimacy

Keywords: Mobile media, MMS (multimedia messaging), techno-affective practices, performativity, family

I will discuss a series of participatory media art projects that focus on mobile and audiovisual mediations of the family life. These projects, which are part of an ongoing series, take ludic pleasure in improvising and staging everyday events. However, they also raise the question of the proper strategy for elaborating on and operating within the relations of institutionalized and intimate power.

The title "performing families" could be twice decoded. First, it refers to those families, including my son and myself, who have participated and performed in the projects. Second, it suggests understanding the families themselves in terms of performativity: as configurations in process within the socio-material and techno-affective relations. The series of mobile projects will be framed as sites for these multiple instances of the performance and they will include: the birth clinic, mobility and its absence in the form of imagined journey, home and its everyday extensions, and dreaming as the intertwining of the urban experience and desire (the last one in

progress). Particular attention will be paid to the interrelations of the technical and the affective in producing these mobile intimacies.

See also: The Double , mobile experiment

Heidi Tikka is a media artist and researcher in the USED Urban Spaces and Experience Design project. She leads courses at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki where she also was professor in 2001-02. Her interactive installations, many of which have been realized in collaboration with her son, have been shown internationally and her work was awarded the first AVEK media art prize in 2004. In her research and practice she has provided alternative views to interface development and affective computing. Her recent work has presented participatory projects that use mobile technology.

http://mlab.uiah.fi/~htikka/
http://used.m-cult.org/heidi_tikka.html