iPhone live
10th Anniversary Celebration of iPhone live by Johannes P Osterhoff @ /Rosa
/rosa
About the event
Ten years ago Interface Artist Johannes P Osterhoff went live. From June 29, 2012 he made his jailbroken iPhone broadcast a screenshot to a public website each time he was pressing the home button – and everybody could watch. He did it as an one-year art performance. This was his manifesto:
"I, Johannes P Osterhoff, shall do another one-year performance piece. The piece is called 'iPhone live' and documents the activities performed on my mobile phone during a year. The performance takes place from June 29, 2012 until June 28, 2013. I will not use other mobile phones during this year."
Each time a home button on an iPhone is pressed and the current app is minimized, the device automatically takes a screenshot of the this app to display a zooming effect. This is still the case on iPhones today. For his performance, Osterhoff installed two shell scripts on his jailbroken iPhone: the first one duplicated each screenshot so that the files cannot be overwritten the next time the app is minimized. The second script uploaded these screens automatically to his public site.
Exactly ten years later /rosa will celebrate the anniversary of Osterhoff's performance. Celebration will start on June 29, 2022 at 6 PM. All 13567 screenshots will be shown as an evening-long video. https://iphone-live.rhizome.org/
participants
Four companions will look back on the performance, contextualize it, and reflect from current developments in art, society, and technology:
Tatiana Bazzichelli Disruption Network Lab
Tatiana Bazzichelli is a curator and researcher on information technology, network culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing. She is the artistic director and founder of Disruption Network Lab, a Berlin-based nonprofit organization that has since 2014 organized participatory, interdisciplinary, international events at the intersection of human rights and technology with the objective of strengthening freedom of speech. Until 2014 Tatiana was program curator of the transmediale festival in Berlin, where she developed the reSource program and made 'iPhone live' known to a wider audience.
Dragan Espenschied Rhizome
Dragan Espenschied is director of Digital Preservation at Rhizome, a digital arts organization headquartered on the web and in New York, where he designs and builds online infrastructure to keep accessible the institution's collection of more than 2000 pieces of net art, software art, and digital art, all based on open source tools. Recently Dragan conserved Osterhoff's performance and made it available on Rhizome's infrastructure.
Prof. Søren Bro Pold Aarhus University
Søren Bro Pold is PhD and Associate Professor of digital aesthetics. He has published on digital and media aesthetics – from the 19th-century panorama to the interface in its various forms, e.g. on electronic literature, net art, software art, creative software, urban interfaces and digital culture, and he has participated in founding several of these fields since the mid-1990s. Søren has coined the term 'Controlled Consumption Interfaces' and contextualized 'iPhone live' as an insurrection of a solitary AppStore user to such control.
Michael Seemann mspr0
Michael Seemann received his doctorate in media studies at the University of Tübingen in 2021. Since 2005 he has been active with various projects on the Internet. At the beginning of 2010, he started the blog 'CTRL-Verlust', in which he writes about the loss of control over the data on the Internet. Michael writes for various media such as RollingStone, ZEIT Online, SPEX, SPIEGEL Online. His current book, 'Die Macht der Plattformen' ('The Power of Platforms'), was published in 2021. Michael will outline his theory on platforms and draw connections to 'iPhone live' that opposes the AppStore as a platform and brings back general purpose computing to the iPhone.