Assignments

Due in two weeks: April 3 (no regular class next week as students will be attending the Symposium)

Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium

Each student is required to attend two days of the three-day Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium, which takes place each evening on March 29, 30, 31, uniting Singapore and Chicago/US. Students will attend online via Adobe Connect Webconferencing. This is an opportunity to experience and participate in an international symposium event that will involve artists and scholars from around the world in the creation of new Internet performance works, keynote lectures, and global roundtable discussions. Each student will prepare questions for participation. See the Symposium Website for additional details, including scheduling and program.

Schedule @ a Glance:

Day 1: March 29 – ADM (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Maria Chatzichristodoulou
Internet Performance by Annie Abrahams and collaborators

Day 2: March 30 – LASALLE College of the Arts (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Matt Adams, co-founder of Blast Theory

Day 3: March 31 – School of the Art Institute of Chicago (11pm-2am)
Internet Performance by Jon Cates and collaborators

To Login: https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork/
Select “Guest,” type your name, “Enter Room”

Symposium Hyperessay

Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium – Each student will write a 1000 word Hyperessay based on your attendance of two days of the Symposium See the Symposium Hyperessay description for additional assignment details. Each student will give a 10 minute summary presentation of their Hyperessay from OSS when we return on April 3rd. 

Final Research Hyperessay

For the Final Hyperessay, students will conduct independent research based on a selected artist who has not been discussed in the course. For the next session, each student will select an artist and provide a rationale for their choice. This will be discussed in class followed by an OSS post that provides a short overview of the work of the artist. See Final Research Hyperessay assignment description for additional details.

1. Artist Selection: Each student will select an artist and provide a rationale for their choice. This will be discussed in class including an OSS post that provides a brief overview and image of the artist. Use the Category “Process.” Due: Tuesday, April 3rd.

Outline

Review of Adobe Connect

We will review Adobe Connect, the Webconferencing software used for the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium. Each student will setup their laptop with Adobe Connect using the following instructions:

1. Take the Adobe Connect Connection Test, this diagnostic will ensure your computer and network connections are properly configured. Download the Adobe Connect application if prompted.
2. Login at: https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork
3. Select “Enter as Guest”
4. Click on “Enter Room”

We will go over the basic functionality of Adobe Connect, in particularly the chat space where students will have the opportunity to participate in discussion.

Artistic Works for Review

Blast Theory, work for review – Kidnap

Reading: Maria Chatzichristodoulou, M., J. Jefferies and R. Zerihan, How to Kidnap your Audiences An Interview with Matt Adams from Blast Theory, 2009, Interfaces of Performance. Farnham: Ashgate

Maria Chatzichristodoulou, performance scholar, will be the keynote speaker for Day 1 of the Symposium on Thursday, March 29th.

Their work explores the relationship between real, virtual and fictional with a focus on the socio-political aspects of technology and how these affect social dynamics… in this kind of work active involvement with the piece is a prerequisite.

As we have seen this semester, the introduction of interactivity, the immaterial, the immersive, etc., have led to a dissolution of the object and blurring of the divide between artist and viewer. Blast Theory situations this dynamic in the public space and the virtual space via networked technologies to bring the viewer into a participatory relationship to the work.

In Kidnap, we wanted to make a piece about giving up control. The questions were: in what ways do audience members give up control to the performers on stage? Why do they do that and how can we expose this? How can we play with this boundary? The idea we came up with was to allow audience members themselves to be at the very centre of the piece, to actually be the protagonists. We suddenly thought that the ultimate destination of that process of enquiry would be to ask our audiences to be kidnapped by us, allow us to take complete control of their existence over a period of two days.

How does the premise of Kidnap, play into our study of the changing paradigm between artist, artwork and viewer? The idea of turning over control to the viewer. Is this perhaps a reversal in that they are taking away control, in order to look critically at how the artist gains control of the viewer, and in turn how the viewer seeks to give up control. It is all a study of control not just in art, but in human behavior.

the question we set ourselves was: why do so many of us give up control so readily to others and what is the pleasure in that?

How might we equate this desire to give up control with our social media lives, relationships, profiles, and digital identity. Are we willing to give up control of our data for some kind of pleasurable or social experience?

You say that, through your work, you want to find new interfaces to connect the digital with the physical, the real with the virtual. From my personal experience, the boundaries between the real and the fictional or virtual are always vague, confused and difficult to trace in your projects. For example, Kidnap participants said, after the event, that they were upset about what was happening at the time as they did not know where the limits were, where this experience would stop or how far it would go.

Blast Theory confuses the difference between reality and fiction, much like the premise of reality television. In Kidnap, the viewers were not sure whether they were in an artwork or a real kidnapping? We have talked a lot about the suspension of disbelief: has Blast Theory pushed this idea further? Imagine if you were not sure if a Wagnerian opera or a Char Davies VR installation is real or not!

And again we turn to social media and our digital personas and wonder how much of the world and its inhabitants are real or a digital construction! Where has New Media taken us over the past 70 years since Vannevar Bush invented the idea of the hyperlink and the media workstation?

Matt Adams co-founder of Blast Theory

Matt Adams, co-founder of Blast Theory, will be the keynote speaker for Day of the Symposium on Friday, March 30th.

Kidnap by Blast Theory (1998)

From the Blast Theory Website:

Entrants paid £10 to enter a lottery in the hope of being kidnapped. Ten finalists were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners – Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store – were snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location for 48 hours. The process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video Blipvert was shown at cinemas around the UK.

(see also blog post: The Participatory Act of Giving up Control)

Yielding to the stranger, or the “other,” according to Dixon, plays into one of the essential aspects of existentialism: human freedom.

How does Kidnap viscerally question the idea, the very existence, of human freedom, when in fact we are so willing to give up control in social, political, and artistic situations?

Through social networking sites, for example, we all represent different slices of our personality. How can we make sense of the world when we are overwhelmed with different sources of information, when there is such a fluid boundary between fact and fiction? – Maria Chatzichristodoulou

These are prescient words in contemporary media culture, as we find ourselves increasingly submitting to cybernetic systems of control that mediate our experiences. In the work of Blast Theory, they situate the viewer in complex, socially dynamic situations to ask the hard, problematic questions: what kind of existential trap have we entered into in terms of our acceptance, reliance, and desire for technological engagement that permeates all aspects of our personal, political, social and emotional lives?

Annie Abrahams: work for review –  The Big Kiss

Reading: Annie Abrahams, Trapped to Reveal, 2011, Journal for Artistic Research

I am not a performer, I use performance to do research.
I am not a researcher, I use research in my performance pieces.
I am a performer who uses research as a medium.
I am a performer researching encounters.

What is the relationship between art, performance and research in the work of Annie Abrahams?

So these (social networking, cybernetic, informational, digital, virtual) relations also become superficial and make us ask, “Who are we when we don’t perform? Why can’t we show our vulnerable, messy sides? Why can’t I be boring and cherish solitude anymore?”

Has our relationship to the network altered our ability to cease performing, show our unfiltered sides, and enjoy solitude without the constant stimulation of digital communications?

In a society where authenticity and privacy become endangered it is important to find ways to access our vulnerabilities and doubts, to make them public, to cherish our messy side. We need to make space for the beast in the beauty, to go back to reality, to claim the human.

Have we lost this ability in our network culture? Have we created a glossy image of ourselves through social media? Are we afraid to reveal certain things about ourselves online that we would not hesitate to do in Real Life?

Did nobody understand that collaboration using machines wasn’t easier, maybe not more difficult either, but simply different from ordinary face to face communication?

Have we lost the ability to distinguish between face to face and online communications? Have we blurred the local and remote into the third space? No we no longer differentiate between that which is real and that which is not?

The Big Kiss might have looked like an intimate performance, but it was closer to a “drawing à deux” session than to a real kiss, even if it did awaken intimate feelings just as drawing a kiss-on paper might have done.

What does the Big Kiss reveal about intimacy via telematics and distance?

So I began thinking about using the webcam interface for an artistic research project on machine mediated collaboration.

How does the Webcam connect two or more people in the shared, networked third space? What kind of intimacy and connection does it produce? What kind of behaviors are possible and not possible? What do we reveal about ourselves via the Webcam that is different from Real Life?

In my art I often act as a scientist. My work is experimental, in the sense that my performances are experiments. I ask a question. Then I create a situation, using formal protocols and rules, that I hope will give an answer to my question. 

In the Big Kiss, what is revealed about mediated behavior performed telematically at a distance?

I don’t impose, I propose. I offer a situation. I do not explain. I let the performers be, let them take possession of the proposition, use it as they think it suits them so we can watch them trying, evolving, progressing, navigating between their individual presence and collective construction.

How does this relate to the behavioral qualities of cybernetic art we discussed earlier in the semester, in which the “user” like the performer is allowed to choose, to gain control, to have a certain degree of autonomy in their experience and interaction with the work?

The projects (such as Angry Women) situate a condition of lonely togetherness, of life constructing a commonality, of being together and sharing this condition of co-responsibility, of scripted auto-organisation.

How does this condition of “lonely togetherness” resonate with our everyday mediated online experiences?

The performers are so occupied by their interactions, that they don’t have time to negotiate their image as they normally would on the Internet and so, almost without being aware of it, they show their vulnerabilities and doubts, their messy and sloppy sides, their “hidden code”.

(see also blog post: Online En-semble – Entanglement Training)

“We all have one subject, in fact. Mine is communication and the difficulty to communicate at all. Everything I do is around that.” – Annie Abrahams

As we have discussed, in telematic art, the content is communication, and that is precisely what motivates and determines the work of Annie Abrahams.

So instead of dwelling on the frustrations of the network connection, she finds inspiration, and perhaps more importantly, she sets up compelling situations that allow her and others to make critical observations about connection and disconnection.

How we can transfer this knowledge into our own participation in network culture? What does it reveal about ourselves, our mediated relationships, digital identity, and life in the stream of the Internet with all of the inherent flaws and errors of connectivity?

The Big Kiss (2007)

French performance artist Annie Abrahams uses webcam technology to unite participants in a shared electronic space. In this work, the two performers attempt to kiss through the network. Despite physical separation, there is a sense of intimacy and even sexuality in the telematic embrace. We ask the question: are we “alone together,” or are we able to form meaningful and deeply human connections through networked interaction and performance.

This work explores the idea of the “telematic embrace,” a concept discussed by theorist Roy Ascott in terms of qualities of engagement in networked space. Here, cyberperformance artist Annie Abrahams explores the integration of two physical spaces as a stage set for a third space. As the performers combine their telematically connected bodies in the third space, they attempt to reach through the digital divide, to explore a kind of extended human presence across the network. Is this what we experience when we are engaged in a Skype conversation?

Annie Abrahams has a doctoraal (M2) in biology from the University of Utrecht and a MA2 from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem. In her work, using video, performance as well as the internet, she questions the possibilities and the limits of communication in general and more specifically investigates its modes under networked conditions. She is known worldwide for her net art and collective writing experiments and is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. Abrahams creates situations meant to reveal messy and sloppy sides of human behaviour, to trap reality and so makes that reality available for thought.

Jon Cates: work for review: BOLD3RRR

Reading: Randall Packer, Glitched Expectations: Interview with John Cates, 2014, Hyperallergic

I think that my approach to digital arts or new media art is one that takes a systems approach, not in a kind of cold cybernetic way but in a more wholistic sense of system or systematic thinking. Those systems might be broken, they might be glitched, and they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. But still they are functional or functioning in one way or another systematically.

How does this approach in fact depart from or comment from what we have learned about cybernetics, feedback, and entropy. If in fact Wiener was interested in achieving a system that avoids excessive entropy, has Jon Cates taken a different approach, and what is that approach?

I would definitely say that there is a poetic embrace of noise and error.

How does this relate to our studies, for example the work of John Cage, in his Variations V, which was also a study in noise, entropy, and indeterminacy.

We live in a techno-social culture. These technologies are also socially performed, and that means that there is this performative aspect on different sides.

Once again we see artists looking at the performative nature of technology. How does Jon Cates’ embrace of glitch and its errors and flaws (like Annie Abrahams) teach us something new about our relationship to technology within our net culture?

… and open up possibilities, potentialities for people, as well as for myself, but also for a community that can mobilize around these approaches, these ideas. Because it’s counter-intuitive to the rampant, hyper-individualism that lays waste to so much effort that emerges from group practices, communities, to open source culture. This idea of building community, building tools and systems, and sharing those tools and systems within the community so that the community can organize around all of that and then share work and work goes back out into the communities, to keep it alive.

Cates’ work is very focused on collaboration and community, as glitch practices, almost like memes, run their course through a group of artists in Chicago and beyond, evolving, mutating, and ultimately impacting the nature and direction of contemporary art practices. This social dimension is crucial crucial to new media art today, just as it was in the 1960s as we looked at the media collective Ant Farm. Today, the social is invigorated by net culture and social media. How does Cates’ work demonstrate the impact of net culture on new media art practices?

(see also blog post: igaies (intimate glitches across internet errors)

Jon Cates and collaborators are currently developing a series of multifarious and differentiated performance works that coalesce into what Cates refers to as igaies (intimate glitches across internet errors) – small miraculous mistakes, moments of beautiful brokenness – all fused together as a single improvisatory, real-time sensory overload of noise, blood, hashtags, fetishism, sexuality, memes, and #cutestuff.

We will take note in the Symposium how igaies makes use of collaboration, integration, performance, social media, and audience interaction in both the local space (Chicago) and the online space (Singapore), to create a third space performative event the co-mingles the two.

Jon Cates: work for review: BOLD3RRR

BOLD3RRR… Realtime: Reflections and Render-times by jonCates (2012)

Review the depth of glitch and experimentalism of the Website by jonCates

jonCates reflects on Realtime across international timezones. Rendering Time in fragments, errors and overlaps, jonCates plays with recursivities, the way things feedback on themselves. These feedback loops merge personal data and swim in associations from Chicago to Taipei to Boulder and back again. Realtime: Reflections and Render-times by jonCates (2012) was performed live via Skype for MediaLive 2012 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, July 14 2012:

BOLD3RRR… Realtime: Reflections and Render-times by jonCates (2012) is a processed document of Realtime: Reflections and Render-times by jonCates (2012), screen recorded in realtime.  (2012).

This work by jonCates demonstrates the possibilities of performing/streaming directly from the desktop. There are no external video cameras, only the shared, streaming desktop. The real-time aspect of the work is essential, because it is pure process, the artist at work: making, creating, shaping the media in front of our eyes and ears. The work was performed live, there was no editing or reworking of the material, it is exactly what you see on the screen. BOLD3RRR is an example of networked streaming art that demonstrates connectedness: with the ability of the viewer to look through the screen, so to speak, directly at the artist at work: a window that transmits out and allows us to enter in to openly view the artistic process. This is an example of the idea of the open source studio.

Review the first 10 minutes of the video below. How does Jon Cates, in this work, open up his work process, and how is this work a form of social broadcasting, in which the artist is sharing the intimacy of his workspace with the viewer, as he alternately switches in real-time between the desktop and the Webcam, thinking out loud, across networked distances. (He is performing live from Boulder, Colorado to audiences in Chicago and Tapei via Skype.)

Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution

Theme of the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium

Traditional television broadcasting refers to the hierarchical, one-way transmission of media: broadcasting as a monologue. Social broadcasting centers around the shift to many-to-many, participatory forms of expression and transmission: broadcasting as a dialogue. Social broadcasting explores the live video broadcast as a social, collaborative exchange, in which individual broadcasts are aggregated in an interplay of collective improvisation, composition, and narrative. We refer to this collaborative, many-to-many broadcast paradigm as social broadcasting, as opposed to the one-way paradigm of traditional broadcasting. Social broadcasting aggregates the networked transmissions of multiple broadcasters into a DIWO (Do it With Others) exchange of ideas, expressions, performance, and actions.

Media historian and activist Gene Youngblood signals the need for “a communications revolution… an alternative social world” that decentralizes the experience of the live broadcast through the creative work of collaborative communities. In response to Youngblood’s call-to-action, the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium will have as its theme, “Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution.” Through the presentation of keynotes, live performances, and global roundtable discussions, the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium explores the concept of social broadcasting and its histories as a revolutionary shift from one-to-many streaming and performance modalities to distributed peer-to-peer interactions that creatively join artists and audiences in live, networked spaces.

We will see how the idea social broadcasting translates as live performance in new, upcoming works by Annie Abrahams and collaborators in Online En-semble – Entanglement Training, as well as Jon Cates’ new collaborative work igaies (intimate glitches across internet errors). Both of these works will involve performances that are distributed in multiple locations and remote spaces, whose collective transmissions will form a single, unified performance experience broadcast in the third space via Adobe Connect. In the keynote by Maria Chazichristodoulou, she will discuss the history of telematic performance art and how these works have created new communications spaces for social broadcasting. In the keynote by Matt Adams, he will discuss the work of Blast Theory, which blends real and virtual spaces using the network and broadcasting to create social interaction between performers and audiences.

Symposium Hyperessay

We will review the Symposium schedule, student participation, and the Symposium Hyperessay that is due in two weeks. Remember we will have no class next Tuesday.

Final Research Hyperessay

We will review the Final Research Hyperessay, in which each student who choose a new media art to independently research.