![]() ![]() The fruits are two-fold – an ad hoc dance/performance work and filmed footage of the same capture by the phone, which is essentially dictating its own camera angles as part of the performance. I didn’t have the chutzpah to go for the full ZYX random-movement experience in a public arena so outsourced the experience to a twelve-year-old travelling on the London underground. While Last Clock has a corporation-friendly slickness (personalised editions of the work can be commissioned to hook up to streaming footage of a specified locations) ZYX is pleasingly bonkers. Recent winners include Jussi Ängeslevä, Philip Bosch, Ross Cooper & Danqing Shi’s Last Clock (£2.49) – a slick clock face graphic in which hands are represented by coiling slices of video (or live-streamed footage) which refresh each time the hand passes twelve, and Jodi’s ZYX (free), a masochistic take on Dance Dance Revolution, in which users are coerced by their iPhones to perform abstract movement sequences in public. Since 2011 the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe has been running the App Art Award. ![]() There are, of course, other artists exploring this territory, and with them a small but growing subgenre of accessible artist apps, some of which submit to ‘Amazonification’ and some of which eschew it. It’s glitchy, even in designated hotspots, though July has countered that the real-world-style inefficiency of the messaging service is a healthy resistance to ‘Amazonification’ – the expectation that digital interaction will be seamlessly efficient. ![]() Twitter indicates that most of the successful users (and they don’t yet appear abundant) are knocking around Brooklyn, or art institutions at which July has made a presentation. I have yet to get Somebody to work in London, even at the opening of Lisson Gallery’s Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg / Marina Abramović shows (a combination of artists I felt certain would throw out some Miranda July fans). Six months to make a ten-minute film and develop a perfectly functional global-use app is not optimal. I didn’t have the chutzpah to go for the full ZYX random-movement experience in a public arena so outsourced the experience to a twelve-year-old travelling on the London underground The date also coincided neatly with the start of the fashion season: unlike most films shown at Venice, Somebody went up on Youtube almost simultaneously, so the app had to follow suit. Somebody, the film, was launched on 28 August at the Venice film festival, an arena that lent a kudos-like gloss to both July (as filmmaker) and MiuMiu (as patron) for the creative aspect of the project. MiuMiu’s Autumn Winter 2014 collection, from which prominent elements of the film’s costumes were derived, was unveiled in March and arrived in stores in the late summer. The whole slowly-but-surely ethos of rigorous snagging, soft launches, early adopters and territory-by-territory roll out – all of which would really have benefitted Somebody, which, like Uber, needs a geographically proximate core of existing users to function – does not fit in with the fashion cycle. Somebody scores high in certain areas – notably 4 (‘Develop a Brand Identity’) and 8 (‘Make it Highly Visible’) – but falls on 6 (‘Test it to Breaking Point’) and 10 (‘Grow the Right Way’).īoth Somebody the film, and Somebody the app were bankrolled by the fashion brand MiuMiu. The September edition of Wired magazine provides a handy checklist for ‘How to Build a World-Beating App’. The Somebody app exists to download in the real world, and is described by July as a kind of outsourced performance project, but it’s hard to tell how serious a proposition it is. The film follows brightly costumed child-adults as they struggle entertainingly with emotional minutiae before turning to the Somebody app to deliver verbal messages through their choice of a third party – ‘When you can’t be there… Somebody can!’ as the strap line runs. Miranda July’s Somebody (2014) is a short film in the winsome misfit mode that self-identifies as a promo for an eponymous messaging app. ![]()
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