Fantastic Smartphones

Exhibition

Fantastic Smartphones – a series of interactive installations developed by students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design at ECAL, investigating in a critical and offbeat way our relationship with smartphones and the way they influence our daily behavior.

Behind the derision-filled title Fantastic Smartphones, alternative accessories, interactive installations and machine performances highlight the excesses relating to our use of these devices. By imagining innovative ways of interacting with our smartphones or by delegating our repetitive actions to machines, this exhibition takes a critical look at a society that has become addicted to an object that seems to have become indispensable : the “smart” phone.

Is this object, which was initially perceived as an extension, still a source of pleasure or has it become a source of alienation? Bachelor Media & Interaction Design students provide answers to this question through a series of installations that address different aspects of this issue in an original and immersive way. Visitors will be able to discover how to save time when using a dating app; cheat on their personal health data through bots; illustrate the time lost away from their phone; engrave their name on a Wall of Fame to evaluate the value of their actions on social networks; attend a discussion between two smartphones; scroll to infinity in a mesmerising way; discover neologisms relating to new digital behaviours; free themselves from digital addictions; discover what really happens in the cloud thanks to a visual allegory; or witness the strange choreography of a robotic arm that takes pictures of itself with a selfie stick.