Category Archives: Micro-Project

Video Selfie

Prompt

Video Selfie:  Using your iPhone or computer with photo booth (or similar Webcam video software), create a one minute video of yourself that constructs your selfie as an “artistic alter ego:” the artist or designer you want/choose/aspire to be!


To go about doing this, I had to understand what an alter ego was.

“Your alter ego is the other side of your personality from the one which people normally see. “

An alter ego can hence be understood as “the second I” – another different version of me who sometimes comes out.

Result

Here, I’m expressing my singer alter ego – more specifically, my R&B singer alter ego. I express this through the usage of Snapchat’s AR function, transposing Rihanna (my favorite singer)’s face over mine. I’m singing to her song, Unfaithful, too.

̴̘̀G̸̣̽ḷ̶̿i̸̹͌t̶̩͑ċ̶ͅh̵̝͆

Reflection

When glitching up my teammates’ pictures, it was really freeing to be able to delight in making errors on top of degrading the photos. With other projects, I’m scared to make errors – this manifests in me constantly making sure I use many layers on Photoshop in case I need to correct something specifically, or using the Mask feature instead of simply erasing parts of the image away as it is irreversible. I was able to celebrate not being able to go back and redo time and again, in fact, intentionally making sure I made errors, so that their images become even more glitched up. I realized that glitch is a really powerful way of looking at image processing in a way that completely goes against norms, yet works with your intuition in a very fundamental manner.

When artists work with their intuition in this manner, the glitch process produces amazing, unexpected results on the basis that all of us process stimuli very differently. Every progress photo of the glitch process until the last image highlights this – we are able to see each group members’ unique personalities manifesting in the glitch edits they make. On a personal level, this made me anticipate the next progress photo even more – the element of surprise as each of us worked on our images felt great. I felt like I came to know my teammates a little more, and couldn’t wait to see how my selfie turned out.

And how beautiful did my selfie turn out; it’s so chaotic with the bright colors and angular geometric shapes – such a really fun aesthetic! What started out as a self-portrait became a group-portrait – what really astonished me about this was how accurate it was a depiction of what I was feeling at that time. With each image, the amount of glitch increases. Likewise, with every passing group member’s image I edited, I felt more and more comfortable with making wilder glitches – in a sense, each glitch edit I made became crazier. The fact that this chronological change in mental state is being echoed in my selfies signaled to me that my group members, too, may have felt this increasing liberation. Maybe it was unconscious, but the collective process gave meaning to my selfie.

On top of producing an unexpected result that I could not not have achieved on my own, this project gave me insight into my own mental processes through a physical manifestation as well, which I found really amazing.

The Telematic Embrace

Last week, we immersed ourselves as a class into the third space with Adobe Connect. Our second spaces were relatively the same as we were all in the same classroom, but Adobe connect enabled us to see everyone at once, which was something we were previously not able to do due to our seating positions. It was also interesting to see how our virtual positions differed from physical reality, with our positions all mixed up on screen – the person to the left and right of me, for example, were at opposite ends of the classroom. I’ll discuss some of the key concepts we touched upon in class.

Image courtesy of Randall Packer

The million-dollar keyword Randall Packer emphasized on was “negotiation”. Be it aligning our arms together, or making a “pen train”, we wouldn’t have gotten the results we did without negotiating and compromising with one another and adjusting as when we saw fit. I felt that this exercise really exemplified the term “Do It With Others”.

Image courtesy of Randall Packer

It took a fair amount of time to get things perfectly aligned sometimes, especially because we couldn’t really talk to another considering our partners were on opposite sides of the room.

Speaking of which, it was fascinating to interact with each other through gestures from opposite sides of the class. It’s different from when we Skype with our friends, for example, or from the Social Broadcasting experiment from week one, because we are consciously aware that we are performing a collective action.

Image courtesy of Randall Packer

The scale of the project was also an important feature to take note of – I’d never been in such a large conference, and the possibilities that that number brought to the table reaped beautiful results. For example, we are able to appreciate the sheer variety of images here, and conjuring up a narrative for each image is a delightful task on its own.

Image courtesy of Randall Packer

This image was particularly beautiful to me – I would never have noticed everyone’s eyes in real life to this level of close-up. This collective action of putting our eyes close to the camera is all the more emphasized with the small screen – objects seem all the more bigger without all the objects that they would be surrounded with in real life. The eye here then becomes the most important thing as it encompasses all of the actuality in the third space.

 

[EI] Tele-Stroll: A Tale of Two Cities

Felicia and I thought of a couple other ideas before settling on our final idea: we thought about playing hide and seek on camera (with penalties), dancing to Bruno Mars songs, or interviewing people in religious places in an attempt to understand different religions better – in the end, we settled on a Tinder-in-real-life concept.

Felicia and I would find guys for each other within the span of 15 minutes, conduct a short street-style interview, and pose a final question: “Would you swipe right on my friend on Tinder?” If yes (and they did turn out to be all yes-es, Felicia is gorgeous), the guy and the person we pick them for would form a heart shape in the middle of the split-screen.

We were inspired by this video, but modified it such that we would interact with the guy that the other chooses for us in the third space. We started with a brief overview of our “types” – we would try and find a guy that could possibly fit those qualities. Felicia liked tall, funny and friendly guys, so I tried looking for guys that (were tall) and looked friendly.

 

Funnily enough, it was evocative of Tinder’s Discovery settings, where you can set your maximum distance to swipe on. I guess our real-life distance radius was about 1 km.

 

 

 

 

Why the Charles Dickens-ish title, then?

Felicia and I filmed in two “Cities” – I was inside City Square mall, while Felicia was at City Hall, alongside the Singapore River. The contrast between the two settings was interesting – the inside of the mall had louder background noise, whilst the open air area alongside the river made for a scenic background.

It was daunting task going up to strangers, but we thought it added an element of uncertainty that would create anticipation for the viewer, as well. Finally, a big thank you to Felicia for being so great throughout the whole process!

P.S. So sorry about the late post, I realized that this was saved as a draft.

Posted by Balachander Prashanthi on Sunday, 21 January 2018

[EI] An experiment in Social Broadcasting

Posted by Balachander Prashanthi on Thursday, 18 January 2018

Social broadcasting was really fun! It was nice getting out of class and videoing everything, which is what I do pretty much everyday with Snapchat, but for shorter durations of 2-5 seconds. I was very conscious of what I was saying and how I was behaving. I got to experience indeterminacy first hand, with me running into Daniel, my debate partner, towards the end of the broadcast – he’s not from ADM and it was a pleasant surprise seeing him.

It was a bit thrilling knowing that I was being broadcast, because it was possible that Facebook friends, most of whom I’ve not spoken to in years, could see what I was doing and how I looked like. This was in stark contrast to everyday life where I pretty much only interact with a handful of people on a daily basis. This tied in to the concept of global communication that Prof Packer was discussing earlier on; indeed, with the internet as a platform for social broadcasting, I’m not confined to a physical room.

Here’s a link to the video wall!: https://thirdspacenetwork.com/public-video-wall/ 🙂