Jonathan Swift's Gulliver sailed to the island of Lilliput but Simone Michelin's version of Lilliput is an archipelago of three islands - museum, Internet, and mobile phone - coordinated to produce wallpapers and digital films for mobiles. In the museum, there is a scenario similar to a public square with monuments, where the visitor (or traveler) captures images. The site archives the image collection and functions as a platform to "download art to your mobile phone". Ultimately, Lilliput consecrates the mobile phone as a public space where interpersonal and aesthetic experiences converge.
In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift examines the essence of human nature; are humans basically rational and good beings or impulsive and cruel beasts? ... Lilliput, the land of the teeny men, an island Gulliver get to after a shipwreck, is a metaphor of Rio de Janeiro, presented here as a virtual reality, a safe tourism in the world of the everythingless, where you place yourself under the skin of the other, a kind of avatar that circulates safely, preventing incident ackward. Lilliput reflects on aspects of the constitutive relations of the public domain. In the context of late capitalism that produces the most sophisticated technological prosthesis to embody human desires, the technology of mobile communication represents the last accessible (temporary) conquest. The work comments on aspects of the society of control's contemporary scenes, where the construction of reality depends heavily on the workmanship in the articulation of powerful images.
Lilliput is a system composed of a human, physical and technological infrastructure that makes feasible the production of wallpapers and digital movies for cell phones. In the actual space where it occurs, the visitor chooses where to position him/herself in a photographic setting; photographs of homeless people in real size mounted on panels, with their faces missing, so that visitors can place their heads onto the cut-out bodies. Cell phones equipped with cameras capture these images (photos, videos) and make an upload to the website, where they can be combined with other virtual settings, producing wallpapers and panoramas that can be downloaded to the cell phone again, through the website of the project.
