How Smartphones Opened Up a Wonderful New Frontier for Art

David Sparshott For most of history, great art tended to be inseparable from its physical setting. There was no Sphinx without Giza, no Creation of Adam without the Sistine Chapel, no Hamlet (in performance, at least) without the Globe Theater. Only in the age of reproduction (first mechanical, then digital) did we cut that once […]

David Sparshott

For most of history, great art tended to be inseparable from its physical setting. There was no Sphinx without Giza, no Creation of Adam without the Sistine Chapel, no Hamlet (in performance, at least) without the Globe Theater. Only in the age of reproduction (first mechanical, then digital) did we cut that once inseverable tie—culminating in our present era, when we can see and hear and watch whatever we want from wherever we are.

The irony, though, is that our mobile devices, even as they further untether our consumption of art, are nevertheless attuned to location in a historically unprecedented way. The smartphone, unlike the sheaf of paper, the marble block, the concert hall, the television, the PC, or any other previous medium for creativity, possesses an intrinsic awareness of where it is. So in the mobile era, as we consume more creativity on our phones, we have the potential to add a whole new layer to art. We can enjoy digital art that's imbued with a sense of place, and—far more important—we can once again imbue places with a sense of art.

Already some early experiments have given us a tantalizing glimpse of how this future might unfold. A few years ago, a DC-based band called Bluebrain set out to reinvent the entire idea of an album, reorganizing it entirely around location. Visitors who downloaded the group's National Mall app and walked the paths of that Washington landmark would receive a suite of different looping sounds, each cued to one of 264 separate zones and triggered by GPS locations. If you left the mall, all the sounds faded to silence; Bluebrain created an experience that was available only to a listener willing to make the trip, to step inside the space the band had consecrated. As a way of organizing music, it was unprecedented, a flash of insight on par with the magical moment when albums first came into their own as coherent works of art. (As The Washington Post's pop-music critic, Chris Richards, put it: “Somewhere, Sgt. Pepper is smiling.”) The band also made apps for Central Park and Austin's downtown, and announced plans to create a fourth for California's Pacific Coast Highway.

On a more prosaic level, we've been slowly acclimating to the idea that phones can unlock hidden information—witness the spread of services like Foursquare and Highlight, where social connection is overlaid onto physical space. An even more creative approach to location-based interplay animates Findery, the new startup from Caterina Fake (cofounder of Flickr and Hunch), whose users leave geotagged notes for others to find. And we're bringing museum-like informational experiences out into the world: With GPS, the audio guide has been turned inside out through services like AudioConexus and GyPSy Guide, which offer self-guided tours keyed to location.

And all this has happened before we've really had the technology to execute such projects reliably. Cell-phone-grade GPS has never been accurate enough to locate users with precision, and with its reliance on a satellite uplink, GPS takes such a toll on battery life that no application can afford to use it for long. But with Apple's iBeacon protocol—as well as a handful of other new technologies built on top of low-energy Bluetooth communications—phones can get a fairly accurate sense of location by communicating with cheap receivers in the environment. The first applications of these new technologies are likely to be mercenary (store shelves that offer you coupons, for example). But once any technology becomes widespread, artistic uses are sure to follow, just as the industrial emergence of steel in the late 19th century led inexorably, by the early 20th, to steel strings for guitars and violins.

It's fun to imagine more projects like Bluebrain's, where somewhat traditional works of art (the song, the photograph, the piece of text) become linked to specific locations where you experience them. But it's even more exciting to imagine whole new modes of creativity, new forms that only become possible with a medium for delivering art—our ubiquitous pocket communicator—that knows intrinsically where it's traveling. Think of a play in which each character is distributed in space or a murder mystery whose clues spill out only as you explore unseen corners of a city. Think of a secret society whose members meet and carry out shared assignments only when an app alerts them to one another's presence. Think of art that stays invisible, music that stays unheard, words that remain unread until they reveal themselves to you in a flash of serendipitous discovery.

Severing art from place has made culture more accessible in every sense: cheaper, more global, more convenient, easier to find. And it has allowed a more democratic group of creators to thrive, now that the inherent limits of physical space (in theaters, galleries, concert halls) have given way to the infinity of the cloud.

But we've lost something in the process—we've lost a sense of hallowed space, a sense of place enchanted by art. City streets and parks remain capacious and free, just waiting to be invisibly embellished. As the mobile screen becomes the first screen we use to consume art, it is, thankfully, engendering the revival of a very old idea: that some experiences are so special they should only happen in just one spot.