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When we think of art, a piece that showcases beauty and perfection comes to mind; a flawless master piece that shows no mistake. Art is creation, but it can also be made with destruction, and that is what we set out to do for this mini-project.

 

 

My group decided to create a video showing the process of destruction of a block of styrofoam through means like cutting, stabbing, dissolving, and crushing. While the process was mainly physical, we also played around with the shakiness of the camera shots and added certain filters to further emphasis the chaos that can be destruction.

With every new method of disfiguring done to the styrofoam, the intensity of destruction increases. There was really no wrong way to do it; we were converting a smooth block of styrofoam into a state of imperfection, full of holes, scratches, and dents. There was a point where by the camera was too close to the block that it got hit, causing shakiness in the shot. Normally, this imperfection would mean the shot would have to be retaken or edited out. However, in this case, we chose to embrace this accident, incorporating it into the video.

The results of this accident actually brings out the unpredictability and chaoticness that is destruction. Accepting and embracing this error helps to capture the raw visualisation of destruction. As described by Menkman, R. (2009) in Glitch Studies Manifesto, ” the beautiful creation of a glitch is uncanny and sublime; the artist tries to catch something that is the result of an uncertain balance, a shifting, un-catchable, unrealized utopia connected to randomness and idyllic disintegrations.”

In addition to carrying out various methods of destruction and keeping all the mistakes made during the process, we also added a few filters and effects while editing the video. In Randall Packer’s, Conversation with Jon Cates (2014), Jon mentioned that, “they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems,” to which I agree with, thus leading to the decisions to make edits to our video. For the first few shots, a filter was added to make the footage look blotchy. As the video progresses, we changed to a negative filter, making everything look dark and distorted. The unnatural colours add a sense of surrealism and  fear to the work, as viewing destruction would make one feel. Some of the footage was also done in time-lapse, speeding up the process of deterioration of the styrofoam. This sped up process allows us to take better notice that something is indeed happening, building the intensity of chaos and destruction.

 

Overall, I’ve learned that that art is not just about creating something perfect, but also about embracing noise and mistakes made. The world we live in is riddled with imperfection, and we tend to cover them up, but as artists, creating something with these raw imprefections can leave us in awe and captivate the attention of others, just as any other artwork.

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For this mini-project, done on Facebook live, my team experimented with the concept of a third space to show a day in a life of a normal girl.

 

To describe the third space, I would say it is a combination of both the physical and virtual platforms; like a bridge that connects these two platforms, allowing for people to interact with one another, regardless of the physical distance between them. It challenges “the limitation imposed by physical boundaries (between countries and bodies)”. Likewise for our mini-project, we were tasked to create a video on Facebook live, one of the requirements being that we have to film in different locations.

 

Despite not being able to talk face-to-face to one another, the boundaries of the third space collapsed through the fact that we were able to get a real-time reactions from one another. For example, one side of the scene in the video shows the girl crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it over her shoulder.

On one side of the screen, we see a hand crumpling the paper before it moves up towards the camera and out of frame.

Consecutively, on the other side, we see the girl throw a paper ball over her shoulder. This shows that despite the boundaries of not being physically side by side, we were still able to synchronize our actions on the third space.

 

Furthermore, intimacy can be created through the third space by making the viewers and even the participants think that this platform is real. As stated by Randall Packer in his article The Third Space, “The third space is a fluid matrix of potentiality and realizable connections to the most far-reaching remoteness.” In this case, the similarity and coordination of our movements on each side of the live video created the illusion that both videos were taken in the same place of the same person, just from two different perspectives. Having to react in real-time during the feed also forms a sense of connection between us as participants in the video, although there was a significant amount of distance between us.

 

Aside from the crushed up paper being thrown over the shoulder, there is another scene where the girl reaches over to close her laptop.

While watching this portion again, I felt as though I was really closing the laptop by myself, when in actuality, there was nothing in front of me to even touch, and that Joey was the one who had the laptop in front of her. This is an example of how the third space fuses the real and virtual worlds together to create a platform that allows is to connect to one another, whether we are physically far apart or not. The real-time aspect of it further strengthens this illusion of realness by allowing us to see and hear things live and interact with one another simultaneously.

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For my group’s crowdsourced artwork, we tried using airdrop to gather photographs from random students in ADM, creating a collage of images that give us a glimpse into the the personal lives of strangers around us. Through this project, we wanted to show the common consciousness amongst ADM students.

 

 

 

Unlike traditional art made by a single artist, this project requires the used of an open-source, allowing anyone to send us image via airdrop and vice versa. This is similar to an artwork done by Craig D. Giffen called ‘Human Clock”; a website based artwork that showed the time using the images sent in by participants.

 

This interaction with and contribution from the participants makes them part of the process, as compared to having them just be observers of the final product of a traditional art piece. As Marc Garrett described in his article on Do-It-With-Others, “it challenges and renegotiates the power roles between artists and curators.” Likewise, in this project, participants were allowed to send us any picture they wanted, we would not have full control over what the end product would look like.

Unfortunately, the project was unsuccessful, mainly because it was conducted in an uncontrolled environment, where we faced higher chances of our invitation to strangers to participate via airdrop being rejected or ignored.

Nonetheless, we learned from this experience that it is better to start off with a controlled environment, such as in-class, where participation from classmates is guaranteed, before stepping out to get strangers to participate.