Subversive Mobile Storytelling

Abstract

This chapter proposes that SMS (Short Message Service) text-messaging on mobile devices can serve as a narrative medium that subverts traditional boundaries of the experience of literature. In a world of increasingly rich media, text has retained its significance on mobile devices through such emerging forms as the SMS novel. The nature of a mobile device used in an urban environment also invokes the Situationist International’s concern with the subjectivity of place, which has been a point of departure for the discussion of locative media. Further, the imperative poetics of text-messaging suggest its use as a contemporary tool in the kind of nontheatrical performance envisioned by Fluxus, a use demonstrated by Tim Etchell’s Surrender Control. Uniquely positioned to combine these methodologies, SMS allows the transposition of literature into the experiential domain, animating fictional text with everyday life. An original artwork, The Wrench, is presented as an example.