FOMObile by Space Caviar at Design Miami/ Basel
Throughout the fair week this June, the FOMObile, a real-time publishing platform developed by design collective Space Caviar, will be stationed at the ground floor entrance of Design Miami/ Basel producing a time-based stream of magazines and taking the form of our guest Insider journalist. Drawing from the cloud of electronic interactions generated by the event to produce an exhibition-in-progress, the FOMObile will transform the intangible media footprint, produced collectively by the fair’s participants, into a visible body of collaboratively generated content — using this media to question notions of privacy, self-representation and identity in the context of 21st-century public space.
Inspired by Bruce Sterling’s statement that “events are the new magazines,” FOMO is an attempt to produce a physical record of the rich yet fleeting bodies of physical interactions and electronic debris generated by event culture, while playing on the lurking “fear of missing out” (an inevitable by-product of the experience economy).
The magazine’s production is a performative process that investigates the aesthetic and conceptual implications of the encounter between a centuries-old tradition of experimental publishing, the rising influence of machine intelligence in media, and the craving for instant gratification produced by realtime technologies. Variables such as background noise, number of people present, and intensity of social media activity inform the appearance of the final output, creating both moments of density and voids of activity. In Dadaist spirit, it is not so much an experiment in precision documentation as in finding alternative methods of representation and documentation of events.
Satellite Exhibition: Joint Photographic Experts Group by Space Caviar
As a medium largely rooted in the analogue culture of the 20th century, photography, like print media, is seen to be in crisis. Yet at the same time we are in something of a golden era of photography, with 1.8 billion photographs uploaded to the web every day. Presented in tandem with the algorithmic publishing platform FOMO, Joint Photographic Experts Group by Space Caviar is an exhibition that uses the visual data generated by visitors to Messe Basel as its point of departure.A dynamic installation updated each day, the exhibition channels the data streams emerging from the audience itself, raising questions around authorship, copyright, identity and privacy in contemporary photography.
