Innovation is No Coincidence


'Bernd Wiemann Bernd Wiemann

The mission of Vodafone Group R&D is to explore new fields worldwide for the Vodafone Corporation and to perform research on new technologies, markets and opportunities for products and services.

In going about it, the horizons of mobile communications are being systematically expanded. The technical perspective is augmented by application-oriented considerations and combined with cultural points of view into a productive, transdisciplinary, collaborative effort.

Engineers, scientists and humanities scholars bring technical expertise and business administrative skills to the team. They also take advantage of many different creative processes like futuristic excursions, improvisational theater and especially the challenges of current artistic positions and discussion forums. These are indispensable catalysts for technological research and the generation and testing of new hypotheses for implementing outcomes—for example, applications connected with wellness, preventive medicine, electronic newspapers and leisure time management.

Multifunctional communications technologies that offer a wide range of services and make use of virtual procedures increasingly determine our everyday life and our culture. In the fabric of interrelationships made up of place, time, information and human beings, our movements, commutes and travels, the way we experience space, and the levels of our imagination are becoming ever more intensively interwoven with one another, and this is increasing the complexity of our lifestyles and ways of life. What long-term influence does the growth of knowledge and insight have in a networked world that is become ever more complex as a result? Which instruments are available to enable us to manage the boundless spectrum of data the future will surely bring? The mandate society is issuing to the developers of new technologies is to do away with all that is convoluted and superfluous, and to make complex systems easy to understand and operate.

The omnipresence of mobility can already be experienced today as the interfaces between the private and public spheres in which transformed social processes are being played out. These overlapping domains engendered by high-tech means of communication occupy the focal point of interest of artists from all over the world.

In cooperation with the Mobile Art Forum Artcircolo, Vodafone Group R&D Germany has been engaged in an ongoing dialog with artists working in a variety of different genres in order to scrutinize the future of work and everyday life from a wide variety of perspectives, to reflect on the essence of these ideas, to manifest them spatially and to shed light on them. The aim is the development and fostering of new media and mobile art formats that are taking a transdisciplinary approach to a wide range of issues (“Mobile Art Lab” as production platform for international artists and media experts).

Song fuer C by M + M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia) and As if we were alone by Empfangshalle (Corbinian Böhm and Michael Gruber) are exemplary projects that deal with communications techniques of future mobile media formats and their effects on the way we behave in public. Both describe visions that flip back and forth between fiction and reality.

Translated from German by Mel Greenwald