Centrifugalforcesº was founded in Spring 2000 to discover ways of using mobile communications technology to write and publish literature. At that time mobile communications technology was text-based, with phone screens displaying SMS or WAP as a limited amount of text, or very rudimentary graphics, in a very small space. The creative form best suited to these limitations was poetry: using precise language to deliver a short, charged communication. As Centrifugalforcesº has developed we’ve worked on ways of trying to build interactive communities who act creatively through mobile devices. We want everyone who has a mobile phone, or any other mobile device, to think of it as a creative tool they always have with them, and that they can use to express themselves at any time. We aim to build giant, open-access arts groups connected by mobile devices. With the advent of Multimedia Messaging Service we will work with photographers, animators, sound artists and musicians as well as writers to expand this creative community. This website is a base-camp for our ideas and events. The list below is a brief description of what we did in our first couple of years. Our projects since then will be added in March 2005. Additionally, read worldwide coverage of Centrifugalforces projects with these links: The Guardian Thefeature.com Wired.com 01 | 02 Webwereld (Holland) Arts Online (The Arts Council of England) ABCtales.com GSMbox.com Itmatters.com (Philippines) . The Urban Beach Spring 2003 In May 2003 Centrifugalforcesº supported Will Cookson with his Urban Beach project, lending him some space on the CityPoems SMS system. The Urban Beach is based in Leeds city centre where old SMS messages can become part of the city environment. The ebbs and flows of people and traffic affect movement and degradation of the messages. Visit the website. City Poems Autumn 2002 – Autumn 2003 City Poems will be a living biography of the city of Leeds in Yorkshire, England, that comes alive as readers move through the city with their mobile phones. As they travel around Leeds readers will find themselves moving through a network of Poem Points attached to landmark sites. Poem Point sites will range from football grounds to art galleries and from parks and bars to local community centres, corner shops and busy bus stops. Each Poem Point will have its own keyword, and by sending this keyword as a text message readers will receive a free short SMS text message poem to their mobile phone. The poem will be site specific and relevant to the nature of each Poem Point, so readers might receive a football poem near the football stadium, a nature poem in Roundhay Park or even a grief poem at the cemetery. City Poems will be generated by the people of Leeds. Initially professional writers will work directly with community groups of all ages, as well as schools, colleges and workplaces to create poems for the project. Groups reflecting the cultural diversity of Leeds will be invited to take part, and Centrifugalforcesº is already working in partnership with a new media project set up to celebrate Leeds’s West Indian Carnival, the oldest event of its kind in Britain. We will also be working with a group of deaf writers who use text messages as an invaluable communications tool. Both SMS and web-based submissions systems will also be set up to allow anyone in Leeds, and beyond, to submit a poem, enabling an open ended creative process after the completion of the writing groups. The City Poems website will provide a map of the Poem Points along with details of the groups who created the poems and a list of keywords so readers outside Leeds can receive the poems. City Poems will use mobile communications to develop a sense of place, lived experience and civic pride. Thumb-Love February 2002 For Valentine’s Day 2002 we published a special selection of romantic Thumb-Love poems small enough to be sent as mobile phone text messages. We felt that Thumb-Love upheld the spirit of true love because aching thumbs would stop would-be Don Juans from sending more than one. Read Thumb-Love. Onesixty Autumn 2001 Centrifugalforcesº was asked to devise a mobile communications project for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and we came up with Onesixty, the world’s first text message literary magazine. Poems could be submitted by SMS or from our website, and the first edition was published on the website in Spring 2002. Onesixty is still going strong and receives around 100 submissions per edition. Visit the magazine to read SMS poems or submit your own. Text Messages Summer 2001 Centrifugalforcesº launched a 'book' of fourteen text message poems called 'Text Messages' available to buy through our website and delivered as one text message per day direct to readers’ mobile phones. Through responses from readers of 'Text Messages' we discovered an unexpected extra side to poetry delivered by SMS. Occasionally readers would find that they received a poem to their mobile phone which matched where they were or what they were doing at the time, so for instance they might receive a poem about a journey while sitting in a train station. These coincidences gave the poems an almost supernatural charge. The 'live' nature of being sent an SMS – even if logically it was from an automated server – meant that the poems had a personal meaning and impact that couldn’t be got from reading them in a book. Though much smaller than The Guardian’s competition (see below) we think of 'Text Messages' as one of our best ideas. In the future millions of 'books' will be bought and paid for every day through mobile devices, to be read on the train home from work and left bookmarked on the library shelves of servers to be picked up and put down at will. 'Text Messages' was the first. Kirklees Schools Text Message Poetry Competition June 2001 Poets Peter Sansom, highly respected director of The Poetry Business and Ann Sansom worked with four schools in Huddersfield and Dewsbury. They ran creative writing workshops for students focusing on writing text message poems, and at the end of each session students entered their poems for the competition by sending them as text messages. The winning poems were then displayed on The Media Centre's Speakers Corner. The Guardian Text Message Poetry Competition Spring 2001 Centrifugalforcesº advised The Guardian newspaper in England on the development of their text message poetry competition, steering the idea towards SMS rather than WAP. Entry to the competition was by sending an original poem by text message, and Centrifugalforcesº devised the competition’s interactive voting structure in which a short list of seven poems were chosen and then sent back to every entrant by SMS, one text message poem per day, and each entrant then voted on the day’s poem by texting back a vote between 1 and 10 to choose the eventual winner. The competition attracted over seven and a half thousand entries in two weeks, and including the voting element was the world’s largest ever interactive mobile creative community, fulfilling the Centrifugalforcesº ideal of building giant, open-access arts groups connected by mobile communications.  SMS Poems – Send To A Friend Spring 2001 The world’s first public literary application of text messaging. Visitors to the Centrifugalforcesº site could send one of four text message poems to a friend’s mobile phone at the click of a mouse. Centrifugalforcesº Website Spring 2001 Launched for Valentines Day, the site included a feature to allow readers to send a Valentine’s Day e-poem. The poems on the site are indexed according to subject, for instance 'scary - don't close your eyes and don't keep them open' as well as by author and title, and if you like a poem you can send it by email to a friend. The Bus-Stop Poems Autumn 2000 Centrifugalforcesº commissioned Joan Jobe Smith and Fred Voss from Long Beach, California and Ian McMillan from Barnsley, South Yorkshire to write new poems for our wapsite. We thought of this idea as being 'Poems on the Underground anywhere in the world'. If you are waiting for a bus with nothing to read, download one of these wonderful poems from our wapsite. The Bus-Stop Poems is probably the first published creative writing commissioned especially for mobile devices. View the poems online here. Funded by Yorkshire Arts in England. Centrifugalforcesº Wapsite Autumn 2000 A wapsite of poetry selected to be quickly downloadable onto WAP devices. Find out more on how to enjoy the wapsite.