School of Art, Long Beach State University
Introduction to the Visual Arts
itemprop="discussionURL"34

Mobile Public Art: Somebody

Banner for Art110 Fall 2015

In 2014 the high-fashion Prada sub-label Miu Miu approached filmmaker-artist Miranda July about creating a film for their Women’s Tales series. Here’s her description of the project:

And here’s the film she wrote and directed, which also serves as a demo for the Mobile App she created:

SomebodyApp.com is a real app for Android & iOS. But it doesn’t have the zillions of users that Instagram or Snapchat have. So for us to explore it, we’ll need to create our own small Somebody Community here in the LBC.

  1. Download the Somebody App & Sign up
  2. to make it work we’ll need to connect to each other. Somebody connects via Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, Gmail, etc. Leave your info here and connect to as many classmates on Somebody as possible.
  3. Send & Deliver as many Somebody messages as possible. They don’t have to all be on Thursday, but that’ll be the easiest day since we’ll all be around in the SOA Gallery Courtyard. Try to get all your connections setup on Tue & Wed and then work with the App on Thursday.
  4. Blog it! Write about your experience of the Somebody App. Compare & Constrast Somebody with Instagram, Periscope & Snapchat. Does this app give you ideas about your own app you might create? Describe your app!

MIranda July in a scene from her short film Somebody

34 Comments

    1. nickram94
      Reply

      Is there a way to add people to your contacts? I don’t see a search tool where you can send a request to be someone friend. There is an option to send people an email but I still don’t know if that actually adds them?

      1. Glenn Zucman
        Reply

        Yes Nick, it works, but it’s a little bit confusing! When you do the email it does give them an invitation that links back to you — it doesn’t “look” like it does, but it does.

        But the weird part is after you invite someone, they have you as a contact and can send Somebody Messages to you… but you don’t seem to have them as a contact.

        It’s a very cool “Art App”, but definitely it doesn’t have all the bugs quite worked out yet!

Comments? Questions? What great art did you see, make, or experience today?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.