Why smartphones belong in a museum

In 1983, the first mobile phone rang for the masses. The original commercial cell phone cost nearly 4,000 dollars. At that price, the huge handheld device didn't become a mass-market item. Years later, in 1996, the cell phone would start becoming popular - and a lot smaller. A current art exhibition in Frankfurt focuses on the device Germans call "Handy."

Although no hamster is part of the exhibition "Hamster Hipster Handy," quite a few of these poor things were used as lab animals to find out if mobile phone radiation could damage hearing and brain functions. The hamster came to symbolize the negative effects of mobile phones on human beings. One of them might want to tell us: Is the smartphone affecting the brain of the hipster?

During a power failure, improvisation is essential. This phone was charged by a hamster turning around in a wheel. This tedious and time-consuming endeavor was ultimately successful. The exhibition's visitors cannot repeat the experiment: The rodent showed up for it only once.

The band Kraftwerk was founded in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. The pioneers of electro-pop produced their album "Autobahn" using electronic sounds only, back when computers took up whole rooms and mobile phones were still to be invented. The artists saw themselves more as machinists than musicians - they play on their robot image to this day.

Countless essential accessories would not exist, were it not for the cell phone: This phone holder is just one example. The mobile phone affects our behavior as consumers as well as our communication patterns. Who still writes letters in this age of instant messaging apps?

We've all experienced it: Being stuck somewhere forced to overhear the conversation of a stranger. Mobile phone users tend to assume that they are alone in the world. Stefan Constantinescu caricatures this everyday phenomenon in a short film: The man pictured here is making terrifying threats on his phone while the lady next to him pretends to be totally uninvolved.

Using an app, the designer Luis Hernan measures digital tracks and makes them visible for the human eye. Signal strengths are turned into colored light: Reds for high intensity, blues for low intensity. His walk-in installations provide a technical-aesthetic illustration of mobile phone technology.

This work highlights everyday mass surveillance. The video clips shown in this installation are from hacked smartphones. The camera function of a stranger's phone is activated by a malicious program through a public wireless network, says artist Florian Mehnert. Here the visitor becomes an observer.

Video cameras can be used for surveillance, but they can also reveal injustice. This selfie of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei being carried away by the police went viral on Twitter in 2009. Meanwhile, the selfie has become a mass phenomenon. An international congress of scientists in Marburg is now analyzing what motivates millions of people to post their pictures on the Internet.

The New York artist J. Robert Feld's work comments the way technology is invading museums. Instead of taking the time to observe the exhibits, many visitors rush from one artwork to other, photographing them along the way. This phenomenon inspired Feld to produce a series of pictures where the viewer can discover the true colors of a Mondrian painting through the display of a tablet.

The creations of the French artist Cedric Blanchon could not exist without smartphones. He photographs his subjects with an iPhone and edits the pictures on the device as well. In this way, he produces works of art with Surrealist aesthetics. He won the first prize in the newly created competition "Annual Mobile Photography" in 2013.

Were these pictures taken in a passport photo booth or with a mobile phone? The artist J.K. Keller leaves the question unanswered in his work "4 Averages," in which series of photos were made infinitely small. The exhibition "Hamster Hipster Handy. Under the Spellbound of the Mobile Phone" is shown until July 5 at the Museum of Applied Art in Frankfurt.