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Mobile Phones As Artistic Tools?

Has the mobile phone come far enough to be its own artistic tool or medium? The Betty K Mix Studio thinks so, and recently conducted an artistic experiment with 25 painters to create a collective piece of artwork with mobile phones.

The live art blog experiment was held at the Betty K Mix Studio in New York City and made possible with Cellfish.com, an online mobile entertainment portal. This is how it worked:

Each artist had a blank panel reserved on the Fusion Art Channel, and populated the page with pictures taken from their Motorola Razr camera phones.

During the workshop, the artists took thousands of pictures, ranging from their paintings to their vision of the city, and uploaded them live on the Fusion Art Channel.

Users were able to follow the creative process of fusion painting as it happened, from the studio set up to the art opening.

The artistic vision to pull off this project was in part studio owner Betty K's. "As an artist and entrepreneur, I have always been interested in how technology can open new avenues for creativity," she said in a prepared statement.

This isn't the first use of mobile phones for creative purposes. We already use them to listen to music. Some Sprint phones let you compose your own melodies and turn them into ringtones. Earlier this week, I reported on Italian author Roberto Bernocco's use of a cell phone to write a science fiction novel.

Others use the on-board cameras to further their photography and video interests. In fact, mobile phone video competitions have sprung up across the Web. Do all these signs point to the mobile phone's acceptance as a new medium for creating -- or consuming -- art?

They've definitely made strides. Now that models, such as the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot series come with 3- to 5-megapixel cameras embedded, the quality of both still and moving images that we can capture with phones has increased drastically.

And then there's all the mobile-centric photo services to consider, such as Flickr and Start Mobile, which host the "art" we've created with our mobile phones. They are there to serve a purpose.

I doubt, though, that we'll see CameraPhone 101 classes springing up at liberal arts schools.

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