dvd video – IAMAS
Confronting two different cultures is better when both are on the road, so out of their protective and familiar shells (the houses or the offices). The intriguing experiment of grouping some ‘Mobnauts’ (digital artists willing to experience a shared mobile space) from Germany and Japan for a three weeksjourney has been clearly successful watching this final report. The Moblab, in fact, was a ‘multimedia-equipped’ bus that for some time has become the center of the crew experiments, becoming their mobile/visiting laboratory and life center. The physical proximity and the common background has acted as ideas fertilizers producing collaborative experiments and mutual support. With blogs written as travelogues, the bus was also eventually transformed by participants in a reactive music instrument and a bodywork paper/canvas. Furthermore the project set a new model for fruitful cultural exchange dealing with the unexpected things occurring while far from home and stopping in ‘host centers’ connecting with local communities. Exonemo’s contribution won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2006: it’s an installation that made the pictures available after being captured by the bus-mounted webcam every five minutes. They become web-downloadable files in the form of printable ‘origami’ foldable bus shape. This mirror of the real traveling bus, was able materializing frozen instants of a remote travel all over a personal space, starting a different perspective of the web, form the mare magnum of information to check, to mediated infrastructure for the sharing of real life experience.