Power Relations in Mobile Connectivity

Mobile communications and mobile information spaces represent typical examples for the alleged “fluidity” of exchange in contemporary “networked” societies – a quality which allows change back and forth effortlessly between spaces separated by economic and/or socio-political boundaries. The commercial marketing discourse of “accessibility” suggests an even stronger form of empowerment – beyond contextual, special and geographic conditions. Visibility today seems to be something that is primarily organized around commodities and consumer goods. In societies of control, invisibility has become something that is organized as well. This means that, on the level of social communications, the division between the two has become increasingly difficult to explain – it has now been assigned to the psyche and intuition of user individuals to digest, to process, to understand what is actually “visible” and “invisible” in any given moment. Over recent decades, questions of visibility/invisibility have become a crucial topic, if not a paradigm in contemporary artistic practices. Accordingly, in my paper, I would like to introduce two art projects, which highlight one of the invisible geopolitical spaces shaped by mobile communication. Analyzing the kind of invisibility that is being represented by these works, I will attempt to discuss and to devise a new set of questions to reconsider visibility and invisibility in the context of power relations in the conditions of mobile connectivity.