Rosalind Barker

we should have stayed here…. is a series of sharp pencil linear contour drawings reflecting an archeologic trip through my families archived mobile phones, now viewed as curios. 

It is 50 years since the first handheld cellular mobile phone call was made. Spring 1973 by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper on the streets of New York. They were huge, heavy and rare as they cost the equivalent of £10,000. You could talk for 35 minutes but the charge time was 10 hours. I was 18 and unaffected.

As mobile technology increased the mobiles shrank, reflected in this series of contour drawings. As they became a co-host to other technical achievements, cameras, computers, apps they slimmed down but scaled up.
In 2023 they are ‘smartphones’, magical devices, addictive and demanding. Few people on the planet remain unaffected including me.

‘A smart phone in itself is not dangerous, but a smartphone loaded with apps becomes a portal to God knows what’ Jonathan Haidt Psychological Prof. New York University’ 

‘we should have stayed here … 1st draft’ is a flattened contour drawing of an early brick type mobile with antennae.