“You’re either on or your off the bus.” – Ken Kesey, as quoted by Tom Wolfe from his book, the Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test
In the 1960s, Ken Kesey catalyzed the hippie generation in the US and the around the world by conducting a social experiment with his collective, the Merry Pranksters. In 1964, they traveled across the US in a wildly painted bus while making a movie of their radical counter-cultural experiment in free expression. The bus, was in many ways the precursor to the Videofreex bus and other hippie busses that were popular during the later 1960s and 70s. The bus was wired for sound and the collective were constantly filming everything and each other. This was before video was available in portable camera form.
The idea of calling the bus Furthur, was to push the boundaries of expression, to go further… into some unexplored space of experimentation and radical social culture. In the 1960s, the Pranksters extended creative expression by using the media of the day, film and audio, to heighten the experience of their bus trip across the United States. In a sense, the bus and its media constituted a kind of third space of social interaction.
Today, the third space is a virtually distributed, networked new frontier. Now where can we go? And how we can go further?
Right now we are in our virtual classroom, Adobe Connect (our bus), but we are distributed in various remote spaces, thus occupying the third space. First we will conduct a few preliminary actions:
— turn your phone camera on selfie mode and point it at the Webcam on your laptop to produce video feedback. We will call this “group feedback.”
— everyone say hello / goodbye into your microphone and the same time at the count of three. We will listen for the slight variations in latencies to create what’s called a “chorusing effect.”
— now everybody type the first four words that come to mind after I say a word in the chat, but just type them one at a time.
While seated at your laptop, everyone with their Web cams and mics on, conduct an independent action that involves an object of your choice, anything, but something that has personal meaning. Then, while performing your action, I want you to “inter-action” with whoever is next to you in the grid, and this may even change over time. Find ways to bridge or engage your objects through the walls of the grid, by touching, looking, pointing, or even joining your objects in some way: in this way collapsing the walls by virtual interpenetrating with one another.
By collapsing the boundaries of the space of the telematic grid, you will be going further into the third space, creatively furthering your collective actions, further into new social territory, further into artistic experimentation that defies distance, so that each of you is, virtually, “on the bus,” of a third space socially-aggregated, collective action-narrative.
