The term (Net.Art) itself was coined in 1995 by Slovenia’s Vuk Ćosić, who famously got his inspiration for it from the postmodern experience of opening an email made up only of “conjoined phrases bungled by a technical glitch, within a morass of alphanumeric jun”. It has since been used to define the critical movement that emerged in the 1990s when artists started to use the Internet itself as a creative medium to explore strange convergences of media, technoculture and code — producing a “non art-art.” – from Hello, World: Let’s (re)make networked art.
The King’s Cross Phone-In was a co-ordinated effort by British artist Heath Bunting to disrupt the everyday routine of King’s Cross railway station. Bunting utilized various newsgroups and emails lists to distribute instructions for the event staged on August 5th, 1994.
The content of the message included the telephone numbers for over 30 public phones located in the King’s Cross station. Participants came from all over the world, and they were advised to call these numbers in a premeditated manner, whether methodical or chaotic. Bunting suggested that participants could also show up during the event, answering phone calls and chatting with those on the other end of the line.
What resulted was an explosion of phone calls in the railway station. The melody and intermittant timing of the calls filling the air with spontaneous noise. People caught unaware at the time were faced with the choice to ignore the activity or participate. Strangers talked with one another and were brought together by the event. For that short period of time King’s Cross railway station became a stage, and passersby became performers.
Using the (then new) internet, and telephone networks in this way is an example of culture jamming that was ahead of its time. It is a beautiful social orchestration to bring awareness to humanity and the burgeoning layers of communication we live together by. – from Art and Electronic Media
“Hole in Space” was a Public Communication Sculpture [for three days]. On a November evening in 1980 the unsuspecting public walking past the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and “The Broadway” department store located in the open air Shopping Center in Century City (Los Angeles), had a surprising counter with each other. Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared.
They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted—no explanation at all was offered. No self-view video monitors to distract from the phenomena of this life–size encounter. […] “Hole–In–Space” suddenly severed the distance between both cities and created an outrageous pedestrian intersection. There was the evening of discovery, followed by the evening of intentional word-of-mouth rendezvous, followed by a mass migration of families and trans–continental loved ones, some of which had not seen each other for over twenty years. – http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hole-in-space/
Telematic Dreaming is an installation that exists within the ISDN digital telephone network. Two separate interfaces are located in separate locations, these interfaces in themselves are dynamic installations that function as customized video-conferencing systems. A double bed is located within both locations, one in a blacked out space and the other in an illuminated space. The bed in the light location has a camera situated directly above it, sending a live video image of the bed, and a person (“A”) lying on it, to a video projector located above the other bed in the blacked out location. The live video image is projected down on to the bed with another person (“B”) on it. A second camera, next to the video projector, sends a live video image of the projection of person “A” with person “B” back to a series of monitors that surround the bed and person “A” in the illuminated location. The telepresent image functions like a mirror that reflects one person within another persons reflection. – from http://www.paulsermon.org/dream/
What’s contact in a machine mediated world? What’s the power of the image? How does it feel to kiss without touching? Does the act change because we see it? What does it mean to construct an image with your tongue? And is there still desire? Does the act provoke it? What’s contact in a machine mediated world?
Machine mediated kissing in a performance = drawing with your tongue = taking pleasure, while constructing an image = a way to be superaware of the other = never totally abandoning yourself = ???????? = not at all like real kissing, it’s better! This might be a female view point. – from Annie Abrahams’s Website
Dutch performance artist Annie Abrahams uses webcam technology to unite participants in the shared electronic third space. In her ground-breaking networked performance The Big Kiss (2008), two performers engage in the act of “kissing” via the network. As with much of Abrahams networked performance art, she questions intimacy and even sexuality in the “telematic embrace,” despite locational separation. She asks: are we “alone together” in our online, virtual relationships, or are we able to form meaningful and deeply human connections through networked interaction and performance.
Annie Abrahams has a Doctoraalin Biology from the University of Utrecht and a Master of Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem, Netherlands. In her work, using video, performance, and 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 Internet performance art. Abrahams creates situations meant to reveal messy and sloppy sides of networked human behaviour, to trap reality and so makes that reality available for thought and critique. – from https://thirdspacenetwork.com/annie-abrahams/
The continual availability of news on laptops, TV’s and smartphones makes us perpetual witnesses to complex situations across the globe. We can feel unease each day through the confrontation with presumed poverty and desperation.
Guilty Landscapes transports images of uneasy responsibility into the white cube of a gallery. In an interactive video installation, the protagonists look directly at the museum visitor, providing a framework for each viewer to scrutinize their own feelings of discomfort. What if the news watches you back? – from http://driesverhoeven.com
“A performative installation about the ambivalent attitude to developing countries and disaster zones. In an internet café, each spectator is in live contact via a computer with a performer 8,000 kilometres away. The performers are in Sri Lanka, on the beach struck by the tsunami in 2004, the natural disaster yielding the greatest financial support ever. In a personal and private chat, the performer and visitor enter into conversation about the different ways people deal with loss.
That chat, which initially appears to be an attempt to get closer to the spectator, gradually appears to be a way to expose our empathic system. Together with the (Western) visitor, the performer in Sri Lanka explore different levels and degradations of empathy.
Through spatial interventions, the chat changes into a physical experience. After a while, the scents and sounds of Sri Lanka appear in the container the visitors are in. When the performers enter the sea, a large body of water flows into the internet café container where the visitors are sitting.”
The Third Space
What is the third space? The concept of the third space has been used as a sociocultural term to designate communal space, as distinct from the home (first space) or work (second space). The third space has been defined as a nightclub or sports arena or museum where the individual can experience a transformative sense of self, identity and relation to others.
With this social definition as a backdrop, the third space in the context of the online medium can be thought of as another form of transformative social space: a way of describing the social dynamics and culture of networked space. To further situate this transposition of the third space into the realm of the telematic, we can now redefine the first and second spaces as the physical (first space) and the remote (second space). When we unite or collapse these two distinction of space, we discover a third space, inhabited collectively by remote participants who are geographically dispersed, but nonetheless, still engaged in the social dynamic of networked interaction.
The third space thus involves the fusion of local and remote participants simultaneously or asynchronously. Furthermore, the experience of blurring real and remote spatial dimensions is heightened in the third space through the collapse of boundaries, when participants feel engaged through the ability to defy distance and connect no matter where. Our new concept of the third space thus extends the model of the transformative social space into the online medium by suggesting a hybrid space that allows remote participants to transcend the limitations of spatial, geographic, and cultural differences as they engage with one another across vast distances.
This transcendence of the laws of the known world is what opens the door to the heightened, extra-sensory qualities of third space experience, altering our sense of identify, reducing inhibition, igniting self-expression, just as the nightclub or stadium operates as an arena for socially heightened moments that extend individual behavior and emotion. – from The Third Space Network
Micro-Project
Micro-Project 3 – Tele-Drift
The Brief
In groups of two, create a 5-minute collaborative performance inspired by Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming.
When you are finished, embed a split-screen version of the video by grabbing the URL by control clicking on the video and select “Show video URL” from the drop-down list.
Create a new OSS post
Incorporate the video link into your OSS post and write a description of the work, where it was performed, its objectives and outcome, and your overall experience of the work.
Assign “Micro-Project” as the Category for your OSS post.
