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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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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.

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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.