Ubiquity - Digital Artefact - E-learning and Digital Cultures

Rosangela Ap. Shadow. #9. (2012). Digital photography. Motorola EX115.

Ubiquity. This is a topic very present in my daily life. Since 2005 I investigate the use of mobile phones to produce works of art. Firstly, I started doing some records to test some images to check the quality at that time I had won a phone with a camera of 1.3 Megapixel.

Even though the resolution and the low quality of the resulting image, I decided to face the fact and I did a series, capturing the city center of Sao Paulo. From then on, I never stopped shooting. Of course, it is not all that I capture or record, but what strikes me at any given place and scene.

I take a lot of train, a journey of about 34 minutes to the center of Sao Paulo, where there is connection to the subway. For this reason, the last and most recent series of videos and photographs, match record of excerpts traveled.

Regarding the course, I think the scroll speed and Wi-Fi existing in the subways and trains, put us in the position of being ubiquitous, since within a second or minute we are in different locations, and we can communicate what we see from transmission image directly by cellphone, whether on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. In addition, electronic billboards located inside of trains give us the news or indication of closeness or places where we arrive, amplifying the notion of current, even though we are far from such an event, for example.

I look younger, our Digital Natives, along the courses I teach about art and technology. I realize that there is no difficulty in the use of digital tools, even the relationship with strangers in virtual communities. However, the main difficulty has been the selection of content and filtering of received data all the time. Some of them, do not turn off their phones as if they were part of his body and were synchronized.

I try to give classes more dynamic, often seeking the requested information in real time and sending your emails or sharing in social networks or weblog. Most of them respond almost automatically to receive, enjoy, but I do not know exactly if they can absorb much of what is discussed. As the vocabulary is monosyllabic or silent, I see it as a reflection of certain incommunicability than they think because of their lack of insight or expertise needed to review a topic or subject.

In this case, I see the downside of being ubiquitous, because, on the one hand the student can communicate with agility, the other does not have the time required to receive, evaluate and criticize, making some fruitless discussions or superficial.

For this reason, I chose an image I made in Luz Station when a train arrived and people were directed to him, many of them students from nearby colleges to train and subway stations, and a video with surround sound capturing images of a train loads. Click on it!
I apologize for any mistakes, this is one of the first short texts that I wrote in English. :)