TouchOn/TouchOff: Mobile Media Art and Digital Wayfaring; Creative Practice Ethnography into Regional Working Mothers’ Commuting Practices

This article reflects upon a mobile art ethnography that sought to understand and rethink some of the tensions around regional/rural experiences of the digital. Using creative practice-based methods, it provides new insights into this regional/urban divide through the motif of working mother commuter as digital wayfarer, a term used to define on/offline digital entanglement through the lived experience of quotidian wayfaring. It contributes to debates around mobile communication and mobile media studies by connecting conceptual analysis of mobilities and its relationship to regional commuting with a creative approach to movement, play and a sense of place. Much of the academic research on mobile media and internet studies stems from an urban focus rather than engaging in the unevenness of the online as is much of the experience in the rural region of North Central Victoria, Australia. Being a working mother commuter for almost a decade, the researcher also took an autobiographical approach to aspects of this project through the lens of digital wayfaring. The artefact used ethnographic case study methods and is a creative non/ fiction sound and moving imagery work made using the mobile phone, within the context of the regional Vline train. Utilising sonified global positioning system (GPS) data as part of the soundscape, it addressed problems in the production of this train activity (i. e. work, creativity, play, rest and playbour) regarding social and material participation of the commute infrastructure and overlaid internet connections. It showed how multisensorial art-making highlights the commute to be a journey to and from - and of - work, within the ecology of the Vline train, and therefore provides new ways of perceiving this copresent, mediated and entangled digital experience.