By: Temporary Services
Published by: Chicago, IL: Half Letter Press, 2012
Pages: 64
Dimensions: 5.5” x 8.5”
Cover: soft cover
Binding: perfect bound
Process: offset
Color: full color throughout
Edition Size: 2044
ISBN: 978-0-9818023-2-9

“Temporary Services [is] dedicated to erasing the distinction between professional and everyday acts of creativity through archives, exhibitions, publications, and public interventions.”
— Gregory Sholette writing about Temporary Services in Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011)

What do artists book libraries built into airstream trailers, bar bikes, and giant windmill blades on wheels have to do with the bypassing traditional forms of social mobility? How can we use mobile projects to reimagine urban and rural spaces that are normally closed to creative gestures and public services?

Mobile Phenomena is a new collection of over eighty-five photographs and two interviews. It is the result of years of research on common instances of mobile phenomena that impact people and their uses of shared city and rural spaces. In this book you will find bookmobiles, mobile forms of commerce, inventive mobile art projects, mobile structures created for use during protest, and some strange applications of mobility that defy easy description,categorization, or whose function could not be readily discerned. Mobile Phenomena can unhinge the expected roles we take in shared city spaces. Mobile structures can become a new norm when they work. It is our hope that this book can be an inspiration to other citizens, artists, activists, nomads, and anyone who is interested in escaping the constraints of their location, culture, or other factors that make realizing oneʼs desires difficult.

Mobile Phenomena includes contributions by: Courtney Dailey, Alexis Petroff, Joseph Robertson, Jen Hofer, Eric Steen, Christian Ettinger, Platform, Liberate Tate, The Center For Tactical Magic, and Nils Norman.

NOTE: We are now offering a PDF of the book for free when you buy a paper copy. Make sure to click the "ZIP" box below to get the PDF.