Personal information

Born in 1982 in Taastrup. Been living in Jutland since 2002. First two years in Fredericia, where I was in the military and worked with electronic warfare, which is about intercepting, decoding, locating and jamming enemy radio waves. Then I moved to Herning for a year and took a theater course at Herning Højskole, Holstebro for half a year doing some training with a woman from the Odin theater with my theater group, and finally Århus. When I'm not doing anything else, I study dramaturgy. The anything else I could be doing is

Quonga, a network for young independent theatre performers in Århus, where we are working on making a theatre festival for young independent theatre at the theatre Katapult in May,
Teater Gromada, a theatre group I started with people from my folk high school in 2006, or maybe
Unge på Flugt, a teaching role playing game where young people in the age of 15-18 are playing refugees travelling from Somalia to Denmark, and we play all the evil people they meet on the way, but I could also be rehearsing for
Plads Til Begejstring, a play that premieres on april 25th at Teater Katapult.

Assignments

Here I will put all the assignments were are given at class.

SMS-story

Text message
`Hej Ulrik. Det er et mærkeligt land det her. For lidt siden kom en af de piger jeg bor med hen og sagde til mig at jeg skulle tage mit undertøj ind fra tørresnoren, for ellers ville der komme nogle mænd og stjæle det og lave sort magi med det. Kh Sarah.`

When my friend Sarah is in India, which is rather more often than anyone else I know, she rarely writes long emails about what she is doing or where in the country she is. Instead I just receive short glimpses of her life on my phone every week or so.

Connor

As I started writing this, I thought it was quite simple. We had read the text "Bags" by Steven Connor, which describes how human lives are defined by bags, and now we had to write a similar text about mobile phones. Of course, what we need to discover while writing is that a mobile phone is just like a bag, because in many ways they have more or less the same function.

"Lives are full of bags. Bags are full of lives." This short line basically describes how Steven Conner thinks of people and our relation to bags, and how we always carry stuff around with us. If I look at my mobile phone, I could say exactly the same:

Lives are full of mobile phones. Mobile phones are full of lives.

Lives are full of both bags and mobile phones. Wherever you go, you always carry a bag with you. The bag contains stuff you need or think you need during the day. A mobile phone contains names and numbers of people you might need during the day, and wherever you go, you always bring it with you.

Mobile phones and bags are full of lives. In a bag you carry around the stuff you need to live your own life, and the stuff that reminds you of other people and their lives. When looking through your contacts list on your mobile phone, you are also reminded of long lost friends and people you wish to avoid. There are fun texts and sweet nothings in your text inbox to remind you of last weekend and the face of your girlfriend.

My first mobile phone

But saying that a mobile phone is just a technological bag for carrying memories of names and numbers would be wrong. Just because bags and mobile phones have similarities doesn't make them the same. That would be the same logic that turned Mother Nille into a stone in the play Erasmus Montanus by Ludvig Holberg. Yet the same logic shows us that these are very different objects: You can carry a mobile phone in your bag, but you cannot carry a bag in your mobile phone. Ergo, a mobile phone is not a bag.

A bag is a container, but a mobile phone is so much more. It is a means of communicating with anyone you know the instant you wish to, but more importantly, it is a means for the rest of the world to communicate with you the instant they wish to. If you loose your bag, the stuff in your bag would have to be replaced, and if your wallet was inside (a bag in a bag), you would have a few days without credit cards and drivers license. Annoying, but it is always possible to borrow money and get a temporary drivers license. The books in your bag are expensive, but replaceable. If you loose your mobile phone, some of the same problematics occur. You can always borrow someone else's mobile phone if you need to call someone, as there are plenty to go around, or use Skype or maybe an old-school phone booth. Phone numbers, if you haven't backed them up on zyb.com or your computer, can be regained with some difficulty from friends, family and phone books. But you would not be able to replace the incoming calls that you were missing while not having a phone. Those incoming calls and texts that your social life depends upon would never reach you.

When I loose my phone, or just forget it at home, I get a little stressed. Is anyone calling me? Texting me? What am I missing? If I forget my bag at home, I am instantly annoyed, and then it passes. There is nothing more to do. In the old days before the new millennium, this was never a problem. Everyone was fine having a cable phone in their home and an answering machine. The coming of the mobile phone has changed all that. Not at an instant. When I got my first mobile phone, it was okay not to bring it everywhere. Since it was the size and weight of a small brick, that was quite lucky. Over the years communicating on text messages became more and more frequent as more and more people joined the hype. Now, when my mobile phone is lost, I am stressed not because of the stuff I carried around in the phone, but because of me being in other peoples mobile phones, and now out of reach.

I am in other peoples mobile phones, but not in their bags.

Mobile Dérive Exercise

I have never before used the camera in my mobile phone. The pictures are not in a good quality, and I only recently got a computer with BlueTooth so that I could transfer the pictures. I prefer my waterproof digital camera with zoom and other fancy options. Taking the pictures below showed me the possibilities of camera phone. I moved from Statsbiblioteket to Musikhuset on my bike, taking several pictures on the way, sometimes on the bike, sometimes walking besides it. My main discovery is that I felt a lot more comfortable taking pictures of strangers with my phone, because I tried to look like i was texting, and therefore they didn't know I was intruding on their privacy.

Click on the pictures to see a larger image.