Song for C


' M+M M+M

With their Song for C, artistic duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia) has come up with a film noir-style detective story in which the boundary between fiction and real life tends to get a bit blurred. Starring Stephan Bissmeier, Anna Schudt, Christoph Luser, Britta Hammelstein and Barbara Rudnik, Song for C utilizes futuristic communications technologies to produce a screenplay that Helmut Krausser developed especially for this project.

The narrative gets the audience of cell phone users partaking of it involved in a drama entailing a variety of different seemingly authentic messages, transmitted images, clues and leads that turn passive viewers into active “voyeurs” of what is transpiring. It works like this: a female detective sends out mobile video dispatches to keep the audience of cell phone users updated about the progress of her investigation and, at the same time, to actively involve them in the case.

The back-story: a father desperately seeking his 18-year-old daughter hires a female detective to track her down. Working undercover, the private eye makes contact with Tom, a shady musician the client’s daughter fell in love with...

Song for C is a pilot project that's the outcome of an interdisciplinary joint venture at the interface of art, technology and academia. The project associates jointly developed a new format for the mobile, back-channel-enabled (bi-directional) “multimedia engine” that used to be referred to simply as a cell phone.

With the setup of its Mobile Art Lab as a production domain for the exclusive use of artists, Vodafone Group R&D is launching a collaborative arrangement with the HGKZ—School of Art and Design Zurich, which has already established a presence in this field through its long-term research commitment to mobile telecommunications and the Mobile Application Design postgraduate program instituted at the school in 2001.

From the perspective of high-tech R&D, artists will be carrying out a creative development process to come up with a laundry list of desirable features, whereby artists become early adopters and can thus have input into the development of new technologies. Song for C is based on cutting-edge technical systems—some still in the development stage—for mobile telecommunications: multifunction cell phones, DVB-H broadcast and interaction that goes far beyond the scope of currently foreseeable capabilities of mobile TV.

Such innovative media formats that are the upshot of interdisciplinary dialog raise a set of issues of overarching significance. How is communication changed by interaction? How powerful an impact are these new technical possibilities having on our life and our culture? How can we maintain an equilibrium between the proliferation of specialized knowledge and the pursuit of a human agenda with objectives like society, behavior and experience?

A cinematic narrative for cell phones by M+M.
Actors: Stephan Bissmeier, Anna Schudt, Christoph Luser, Britta Hammelstein, Barbara Rudnik

Song for C is a cooperation between The School of Art and Design, Zurich (Gerhard Blechinger, Tanja Katharina Gompf) and Mobile Art Lab of Vodafone Group R & D Germany (Bernd Wiemann, Martin Richartz, Serafine A. I. Lindemann/Artcircolo).