Art; a piece created to perfection by an artist and displayed to the audience for its beauty.

That’s what I thought art was. Now, however, I have an new understanding of what art is. It not only refers to just beautiful artworks done solely by an artist, but also raw and imperfect pieces created by both the artist and the audience.

The Symposium emphasised just that, and showed us through several live art and telematic performances how the third space can be used in art to bring people from all over the world together. Maria X explained that “telematic performances transform the screen or projection surface from a non-place to a place of live encounter”, which showed in one of the examples shown in the keynotes, Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon (1992). In this performance,  the artist was videoed live lying down on a bed and a live stream projection was done on a in a different location. This allowed people to meet telematically in the third space, and by projecting on a bed instead of a flat screen, it created a more intimate space for both participants and the artist.

In this day and age, telematic interactions have become part of our daily lives, such as the use of Skype, where we are able to see, hear, and speak to someone in a remote place in real time. In Annie Abraham’s performance during the Symposium, she collaborated with a few other participants, using Adobe Connect as a third space as a performance platform. Throughout the performance, the participants would echo and/or mimic one another’s words and actions based on the topic they are on.

For instance, they started off with no visuals, but just the sound of their voices, saying random phrases and numbers, echoing words such as “excellent”. What I found interesting was that given no instruction or obligation to take part, those watching the performance were actively commenting via text in the chat. At first, many commented on the strangeness of it all, but gradually, we all started taking part, echoing just as the participants were and even retyping the numbers, words, and phrases they said.

They later went on to uncover their webcams, trying to cooperate and show visuals of similar objects, like a white wall and items of similar colour and size. By the end of the performance, everyone had revealed their faces to the audience, going silent the moment they were exposed. They all closed their eyes and only disconnected when they heard Annie’s alarm go off.

This performance embraces and showcases glitches, be it the time lags due to poor connection, resulting in poor synchronicity, or technical issues causing participants to miss out important ques. For example, judging by the fact that Helen, one of the participants, did not open her eyes for a long while after everyone else had done so, it’s possible to say that she might have an issue with her audios.

Aside form glitches, destruction was also embraced, as can be seen in the performances done on the last day of the Symposium. Titled ‘igaies’ (intimate glitching across internet errors), the last performance directed by Jon Cates, who performed with several other artist. The performances were independent on one another, but occurred simultaneously, being recorded and streamed live to the audience. There was chaos and destruction going on, such as the leeches being added to Roberto Sifuentes’ face coupled with Arcángel Constantini’s drawings with noise soundscaped played over the entire performance.

This performance filled with disorder, destruction and glitches shows a few of the little mistakes that happen, yet instead of editing them out or restarting the act to hide them, they were the center of the entire performance. Watching performances like these, I am reminded that imperfection and mistakes are all part of art and should be embraced too.

Overall, I have learnt that art does not necessarily only refer to all things beautiful and perfect, nor is it something created by a single artist. Art celebrates the imperfection in things, connecting people on an intimate level, no matter the distance in between them.