Art on Your Cell Phone

Recent news reports claim that more and more Americans are surfing the web with their cell phones and PDA's. It's hard to believe. The screens are so small and the data most cell phones can handle is severely limited. Not for nothing does one popular TV ad show a hapless cell phone user asking, "Can you hear me now?"

We'll believe surfing the 'Net with cell phones is a promising trend when our own phone can handle telephone calls inside a department store.

Added to that, so we've read, the sundry cell phone manufacturers are no closer to agreeing on a uniform method for rendering web sites than they are on a compatible technology for making telephone calls. The result is not every cell phone can show a "mobile" page in the same way. Some can't do it at all.

Still, the New York Times reported earlier this year cell phone web-surfing is all the rage in the Far East. And it looks like it's coming our way:

It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.

In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.

“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.

In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.

Undoubtedly, instant surfing with a cell phone has its conveniences (when it works). But no one knows if artists, galleries, and museums -- or others with interests centered on the visual arts -- are likely to find them compelling.

Nevertheless, friends of Tu Zhiwei have decided to experiment by dipping a little toe into these murky cellular waters. On the News section of the Tu Art Gallery web site, there's a new hyperlink called "Tu Art News for Mobile Devices." It takes readers to a proto-site titled "Tu Zhiwei Art Mobile."

The "mobile" site is slimmed-down -- downright skinny, in fact -- with only three pages (or "cards" as they are known) and just 15 lines of text and four images, in total. They look fine to computer users. It's anyone's guess how they appear on each of the several thousand different cell phones in use around the world.

The idea behind the "mobile" web site experiment is that PDA and cell phone users may find it convenient at times to surf for calendar or contact information about upcoming art gallery shows. In this instance, what's being offered is, first, hard information about Mr. Tu's next one-man show, scheduled to open at the Andreeva Gallery in Santa Fe on August 16.

Second, they can see a few tiny images of recent shows of Mr. Tu's paintings in Guangzhou, Shaoguan, and Beijing.

Third, cell phone users can use a link on the "mobile" web site to navigate to Andreeva Gallery's own web site and even fire off an email message.

Some new ideas are better than others. This one -- using cell phones to view art -- will take time to mature, at the very best. In the meantime, though, we plan to have fun watching how the experiment turns out.