The mobile app as technique and imaginary tool, offering a shortcut
to instantaneous connection and entertainment. Mobile apps promise
to deliver (h)appiness to our devices at the touch of a finger or
two. Apps offer gratifyingly immediate access to connection and
entertainment. The array of apps downloadable from the app store
may come from the cloud, but they attach themselves firmly to our
individual movement from location to location on earth. In The
Imaginary App, writers, theorists, and artists-including Stephen
Wolfram (in conversation with Paul Miller) and Lev Manovich-explore
the cultural and technological shifts that have accompanied the
emergence of the mobile app. These contributors and interviewees
see apps variously as "a machine of transcendence," "a hulking
wound in our nervous system," or "a promise of new possibilities."
They ask whether the app is an object or a relation, and if it
could be a "metamedium" that supersedes all other artistic media.
They consider the control and power exercised by software
architecture; the app's prosthetic ability to enhance certain human
capacities, in reality or in imagination; the app economy, and the
divergent possibilities it offers of making a living or making a
fortune; and the app as medium and remediator of reality. Also
included (and documented in color) are selected projects by artists
asked to design truly imaginary apps, "icons of the impossible."
These include a female sexual arousal graph using Doppler images;
"The Ultimate App," which accepts a payment and then closes,
without providing information or functionality; and "iLuck," which
uses GPS technology and four-leaf-clover icons to mark places where
luck might be found. Contributors Christian Ulrik Andersen, Thierry
Bardini, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Benjamin H. Bratton, Drew S.
Burk, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Robbie Cormier, Dock Currie, Dal
Yong Jin, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ryan and Hays Holladay, Atle Mikkola
Kjosen, Eric Kluitenberg, Lev Manovich, Vincent Manzerolle,
Svitlana Matviyenko, Dan Mellamphy, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
That Subliminal Kid, Steven Millward, Anna Munster, Soren Bro Pold,
Chris Richards, Scott Snibbe, Nick Srnicek, Stephen Wolfram
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