Nam June Paik

SMS Conceptual Art ...

JRyder's "Summer Kisses", manipulated digital still, 2005



A eve-of-holidays last drink that does not come off can be turned into Art? - the Honourable Reader might be forgiven for his skepticism.

This is a very Hi-Tech conceptual thing and the Honourable Reader has to bear with me while I go through the crucial technical data here. In the beginning you have a incoming SMS in the screen of a ™Nokia 6300 mobile phone. Then you photograph it with a ™Sony Cybershot DSC-T7 and you transfer the image, thanks to Sony ™Picture imaging software into a portable computer ™Compaq Armada 1750. After checking image quality you store it in a ™MyFlash 1G Memory Stick. You then transfer the 557 KB image to the USB port of a ™Hewlett-Packard mainframe computer, via the Memory Stick, and with ™Microsoft Photo Editor-related ™Paint software you make the last manipulations. Having got your final picture you store it as a ™Picassa file and upload it, through ™Hello software, to the ™Blogger site at http://www.blogger.com/, from where it will be published in your blog.

Old sod McLuhan said it all before: the medium is the message.

Summer kisses to you all!

(Note: Nam June Paik is credited with having "invented" videoart when he used a then new Sony Portapak device to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York City)