C94 Column

"There's no place like homepage"

I'm sitting with this guy called Bernie on the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transport rail system), when his mobile squawks. In one smooth movement, he takes off his DVD player, hands me his West Coast Americano drink-on-the-move coffee and grabs the 'hands-free' mike. "No, I'm still on the DART," he explains, "see you in 15."

Bernie is a technology nomad, or 'technomad' for short. A social animal that couldn't exist twenty years ago, in that age before mobile phones and Walkmans. Bernie stores his URLs in his Palmpilot, his phone now has more text messages than voice conversations, and he carries half his home around in his backpack - like a snail and its shell. Technomads like Bernie are always on the move, always networked, able to log on from virtually anywhere (the cybercaff, the WAP-enabled phone) to update their increasingly Web-based datalife. They use text-messages and e-mail and AOL Instant Messenger to connect to each other instantly in this shared online space. They may be sitting next to you but they're really half a world away, having an infrared conversation, organising reunions, newsreading, flat-sharing, job-hopping, joking, flirting...

The Sony Walkman started it all. The Walkman was hardcore 1980s individualism: a cocooning device for your own fantasy soundtrack, spinning you off from your surrounding social space and physical mess. Twenty years and 250 million Walkmans later, Sony has created what it calls a 'headphone culture'. A nomadic gizmo-junkie universe of tiny acronyms (SMS, GPS), ever-tinier sub-laptops, geeky pagers, fob-key security and 'wearable computers'. Technomad technology is the Net in your pocket. Literally. It's mass-produced, cheap, portable and increasingly wearable. It's 'i-glasses' with webcams for zapping your content over the Net, like Max Headroom, all the news that's fit to wear.

The early technomads have already been raised with a network in their cots. OK, up to now it's just been called the 'baby alarm'. But they are growing up in a highly webbed world, in oceans of information moving too fast to be absorbed by a single human brain. Their nomad technologies - all the Networks and Walkmans and mobile phones - have already transformed public space beyond recognition, and we can only imagine what 'full-scale nomadology' will feel like at a social level, when half the people across from you in the DART carriage or business meeting or local pub are zooming across the Net in their wearable computers and virtual worlds.

Some audio artists and situationist pranksters have been there before, creating art events via answering machines or banks of phones in railway stations. But what specific kinds of artworks will emerge in this new nomadic space? When will we see the first 'technomad art galleries'? Or the first 'technomad artists in residence'? Or maybe they're already here, waiting in my in-box, on my PDA...

Michael Cunningham