IPhone arts festival coming to L.A. may be biggest of its kind

What is believed to be the world’s largest iPhone arts festival is headed to Santa Monica on Saturday, unifying a community dedicated to making art on its mobile devices for the first time at this scale.

The L.A. Mobile Arts Festival will kick off Saturday at 7 p.m. and be held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. More than 600 pieces of mobile art will be showcased.

Though the festival focuses mostly on art produced on iPhones, it will also feature some artists using other devices, including the iPad. And not all of the art showcased are photographs -- about 100 pieces will be digital paintings, and some sculptures based on mobile art will be displayed as well.

A lot of people “when they think iPhone art or something iPhoneography they think of Instagram now, which is so huge, and all the snapshots that are up there, and this is just a chance to show people that there’s a lot more really creative work going on and much more than they might expect that’s possible to do with these devices,” said Daria Polichetti, one of the co-founders of iPhoneArt.com, which is holding the festival.

About 225 artists are expected to attend the event, coming in from around the U.S. and at least 30 other countries.

“There’s never been an exhibition with over 100 mobile photographers and mobile artists ever,” said co-founder Nathaniel Park, pointing out that no other shows that have come close to this scale have shown this kind of artwork in printed form.

Polichetti and Park, whose backgrounds are in art and film, said they founded their site to give a new age of artists a platform and community.

“We just started seeing some amazing things being produced,” Polichetti said. “We just wanted to create a platform to help get their work seen.”

The festival will go on for a week, and it will be open from 12 to 6 p.m. during those days.

“This is a huge movement that’s happening,” Polichetti said. “We just wanted to bring that here to L.A. We wanted to show the creative side of iPhoneography, and mobile photography and mobile art.”

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