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Staff: QUICK, THE CUSTOMER IS STARVING! WE NEED TO MAKE A DISH ASAP!

Chef: OKAY, BUT FIRST THING’S FIRST… ANyone knows the recipe?

Staff: …

Chefs: …

*everyone turns to face audience*

Everyone: HALP US

 

And with that, we being the journey with our clueless chefs and their kitchen staff as they rush against time to create a NEW Dish for their valued (and hungry as hell) customer. However, not knowing the recipe, they seek the help of the audience, asking them to suggest ingredients, both edible and inedible. After that, the audience get to lend a helping hand in the kitchen.

 

Wait, let me rephrase that. The audience lends their help by controlling the chefs’ hands.

 

Through the use of Facebook live, we were able to create a third-space where the audience could meet the chefs and give instructions live and directly to them through their comments. Aside from creating a (kitchen) space online, we were also participating in a do-it-with-others (DIWO) via live interaction, with both the audience and artists (or chefs) working together to create a NEW Dish.

 

 

As a member of this DIWO project, I took on the role of one of the chefs, and it was quite a hands-on experience. Playing a chef, I had to either listen out for Celine when she read out the instructions or read directly from the comments myself. The latter proved to be tougher as we progressed with our little cooking session, mainly because we were busy focusing on the tasks at hand. I was also initially worried that there would be a lack of interaction from the audience, but the comment section was flooded with plenty of creative instructions. Too much so, and we ended up missing quite a few of them. This was also partially due to the lag that comes with streaming the video live.

I also tried to stay in character; I wasn’t a student, but a chef, and I made sure to engage with the audience as such. I would rush them to give instructions, since our dear customer was waiting, and at the same time comment on things from a chef’s point of view. I also encouraged the audience by complimenting on their ingenuity. For instance, filling a condom with wasabi and chili-flake covered apples, and then pipping it onto the pear salad as garnish. Pure culinary genius.

 

 

Nonetheless, us chefs were able to execute the instructions well; after getting out hands dirty and conducting many regretful smell tests along the way, we were able to create a NEW dish that looked Good Enough to Eat.

 

Bone apple feet, everyone!

 

 

 

Group members: Celine, Azizah, Hazel, Tanya, Karen

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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.