Graham Harwood is a U.K. artist and provocateur of new and communications media. Founder of the celebrated Mongrel group of artists he has worked at the edges of art practice and social and communications media producing works and systems that present challenges and opportunities for the way people connect through media.
Of his many projects his recent work with telephony systems go some way to documenting the principle concerns of his work. Harwwod has developed a system, the Telephone Trottoire, with which members of the refugee Congolese community in the UK and in the Congo could connect randomly over the telephone in order to share stories and news and choose whether or not to pass that on to another caller. This system routed around the easily traceable nature of mobile telephony and provided a kind of viral mode of unattributable information exchange and communication. In an interview with Rhizome (http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2297) Harwood is at pains to convey the fact that not particular concerned with anything but the utility of the system to the community itself – When the project required funding it was developed as an art project that put the telephone switches upon which the system was based on display – a kind of memorial (The Tantalum Memorial) to a lost age of analog anonymity and communality and a powerful metaphor for the way Tantalum the metal derived from the precious mineral Coltan and central to the function of mobile phones has driven the Congolese apart.
Harwood is responsible for the MediaShed (mediashed.org.uk) a public access media production lab of which the Mongrel artists work. Together with Eyebeam a like institution based in the US Mediashed has produced Gearbox – a collaborative database for low budget and DIY film and video making techniques.
cite: http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2297