Tag: experimental interaction

experimental interaction // final project

April 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

5- minute Video:

Members: Celine, Azizah, Hazel, Tanya, Karen

For our project we were told to choose a location, and then through the third space, incorporate elements of Do-It-With-Others and glitch. We immediately thought about using food for the project, because really, food is the best thing. Through a Facebook page, we communicated with several of our friends and family outside of ADM, asking them to help pick out a ‘recipe’ that our ‘chefs’ (Tanya and Karen) had to prepare for customers that wanted something ~*NEW*~ to eat. In a dilemma, our chefs decided to get ingredients recommended by people online (one ingredient per person), from the North and the East. We would then assemble this new dish in the West.

(N)orth + (E)ast = (W)est

And thus this N.E.W dish would be born from the help of ten or more people over the internet, commenting on the live and collaborating with one another to make a whole new recipe, while us as the curators, would help execute it for them.

Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Good-Enough-to-Eat-436813933437383/?ref=bookmarks

 

The glitch first started when we would tell them to give us anything as an ingredient, including inedibles. Our end goal would be something that ‘looked good enough to eat’, so as long as it worked on a plate and could be put into your mouth, it was an ingredient.

Some glitchy ingredients we got were: Cotton buds, condoms, rubber bands, straws, chalk, candles, white acrylic paint. Someone also asked for some My Little Pony toy. Basically these items weren’t in any way edible, but they could be manipulated in a way that would make them look edible.

For example: white paint as a salad dressing on pear, or straws/rubber bands being used as noodles.

Cooking utensils were also not actual cooking utensils. We used penknives instead of knives, and a cutting mat instead of a chopping board.

The idea of mixing actual food and inedibles was a glitch too, and we were extremely excited to see what our audience would ask us to do.

We separated the group work accordingly:

Pre-Production
Logistics/to buy food: Azizah (NORTH), Hazel and Tanya (EAST)

Production
Cast (chefs): Tanya and Karen

Facebook Live Commentator + video: Celine

Camerawork for documentation: Azizah and Hazel

Post-production
Video Editor: Celine

Assistance (direction, music, etc.): Azizah, Hazel and Tanya

Azizah is behind the camera HAHA.

Pre-production was asking our friends for an ingredient. We would assign around two to three people per group member and ask each person to give ONE ingredient. The group would then buy the necessary ingredients stated, from their specific locations (North or East). This was done a day before filming.

The following day, we would ask our audience for about thirty minutes of their time to watch our live on Facebook. It was seemingly like a cooking show, where there was a long table with the foods displayed. The chefs would be behind this table, and I would show them from afar, and then closer to show how they were ‘cooking’ with the ingredients. I was basically the person encouraging the audience and interacting with them the most directly, while announcing what the comments said to the chefs.

During this thirty minutes, our chefs would be panicked at the start, asking our audience to quickly conjure up instructions based on the various ingredients seen. The comments first came in slow, but more and more people came in eventually, and as people got more comfortable trying to tell the chefs what to do, their requests got more daring.

Many of them also used this space to talk to their friends who were the groupmates, which I found really interesting. I relayed these messages to the chefs, and it was an interesting conversation. Some others, who were not close to the chef, would comment on the ongoing process of the dish.

One problem I faced during the live was that not all the comments would show on my phone. Some comments only appeared via computer, and I was informed of this through Azizah, where some of the more creative comments were. Although we did not manage to finish everyone’s recipe instructions, the ones I did manage to read did make an amazing dish nonetheless.

I realised that I could have used a split screen function that we learnt in our earlier projects to show two things happening at the same time (since there were two chefs), but I also felt that that might have been too jarring to the viewers.

I found that this project was reminiscent of one of my earlier projects (micro-project 2): It’s Storytime, where my group and myself would have various rules/guidelines (ingredients, in this project, although it was also chosen by our audience) and everyone could write two sentences to continue a narrative (make a dish). We tampered with this project however, by putting a third space where everything had to be ‘filtered’ through the third space, and then processed through the hands of the chef, which I thought was a pretty neat touch.

hyperessay // social broadcasting

April 6, 2018 / / 0 Comments

The idea of a perversion and the vulnerability that comes with an alternate social world, being a form of art and meaning has intrigued me after the Symposium. Agency art: the idea of looking into human behaviour as a form of aesthetic, was something I learnt. I was drawn to the ideas Matt Adams brought up during his Keynote on Day 2, which coincidentally resonated amongst the performances seen on Day 3, where he mentions various Blast Theory projects such as Kidnap (1998), and My One Demand (2016), featuring the enhancement of emotional value through the ‘abuse’ of vulnerability of the human self.

There was a lot of cinematic views + music being used to create another layer of emotional value. My One Demand (2016)

The use of anonymous third space behaviour allows for people to open up. My One Demand (2016)

My essay will look further into the concepts of ‘raw feelings’, as mentioned in depth by Matt Adams, and by the igaies crew directed by Jon Cates. In a quote mentioned by Jon Cates in a previous interview with Randall Packer:

“For me this approach to noise or noisiness, or dirt, or dirtiness, is a way to foreground as you say, an aberrance or perversion of normative message or what we might perceive to be logical reasoning.”

— Jon Cates, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates by Randall Packer

In an alternate social world, it takes away many boundaries that one were binded to in a society like my own: Singapore. A country full of rules and Asian traditions, we do not usually seek the unseekable, nor speak the unspeakable. Words were all taboo, and there were many risks with speaking your mind. For a Singaporean Chinese with rather strict parents, it was an eye-opening experience for myself to have been able to witness the discussions of many other artists out there. In a sense, it felt like peeking into a life that I could not ever achieve, and it peeked my interests in many ways, evoking emotions and questions in my head that could not be answered by a fellow Singaporean. To me, the fact that the performance was so different and ‘raw‘, that I wanted to look at it longer, and further understand why they wanted to perform that way. It was due to this glitch, that made me require a knowledge of what was going on.

It brings me back to the Keynote by Matt Adams — that there was always an innate need in a human for voyeurism. I know there is a more sexual meaning to this, but looking it up gave me this meaning:

voyeurism:

enjoyment from seeing the pain or distress of others.

A sense of looking at someone without their permission; voyeurism. Picture: Kidnap (1998)

 

With the idea of glitch; the concept of someone doing something different from you in their most intimate of spaces, brings up another point that Matt Adams made during his Keynote:

The empowering nature of being intimate or vulnerable

Not only did the viewers have their own feelings about the performance, it gave a sense of power to the performers as well. They shaped what the audience could see in their performances, giving them a right to limit what they wanted us to know. It was through their actions that we could evoke any sort of emotion at all. It was also through these limitations that we experienced various emotions.

 

One example would be the puppy by Shawne Michaelain Holloway, who featured themself as a puppy in tight black straps, being dragged down by a television screen (I would presume). It felt like an initmate moment that was usually practiced in a personal and extremely private space. First of all, to have been able to put one’s self out there for a public audience, not to mention a cyber audience that you had no idea of (nor what they looked like should you need to track them down), was an extremely vulnerable but powerful moment. And the angles we were given to witness this private moment, were two cameras:

Performance by Shawne Michaelain Holloway. Top right is a closer angle. Top left is an angle that’s seemingly like a surveillance camera. Performing on bottom left is Akteria, Arcángel Constantini drawing on petri dishes producing live Noise soundscapes.

1. A camera on the floor, near the puppy. It was on a eye level lower than the puppy, and it gave us a sense of ‘we shouldn’t be here seeing this’. It also gave the feeling of being ‘face-to-face’ with someone not on a ‘human’ level, like you could share this moment. Either interpretation is okay.

2. A camera high above, seemingly like a surveillance camera footage. It gave the viewer yet another breech of privacy, and we witness the puppy’s back and how extremely vulnerable they would have been if someone else were to come up behind them.

There was no eye level that was similar to that of a physically capable adult, and it leaves you with a sense of curiosity, endearment, and perhaps one’s own vulnerability to not be able to climb up to one’s own eye level.  It was like the audience were hiding and had nowhere to run, while witnessing this, and it was entrancing in its own right.

Thus brings back the idea of perversion, voyeurism and maybe, masochism. Humans, and I would say, Singaporeans, are all coded in ways to receive these ideas with a sense of shame, and lack of knowledge over them. It is mostly through unsettled emotions and thoughts that these things are mostly viewed and then dismissed quickly. Going back to Blast Theory’s Kidnap (1998), one could only watch as the kidnapees were held hostage, but lacked any sort of power in changing anything. It was through this practice of garnering emotional value from an extremely vulnerable source, that I feel Blast Theory succeeded in, and the risks they took for this to happen was very noteworthy.

The showing of Kidnap (1998).

Their other project, My Neck in the Woods (2013), looked into the lives of teenagers in their comfortable places, learning about them through the third space, achieved the same results (if not, differently in terms of acceptance).

My Neck in the Woods (2013). Learn about the lives of teenagers and where they go to, and how they’d act around a camera.

My Neck in the Woods (2013). One gets to learn about these teenagers’ lives, and get to ask questions like these. It was a conversation through the Third Space, while the broadcast themselves.

I have learnt that ‘raw’ wasn’t necessarily bad, because it brought about thoughts that one might not have considered in a safe, controlled environment. Sure, these experiments and performances might have been controlled spaces in ways, but they were certainly in no way safe, and it was only through the idea of social broadcasting, a space where many others could contribute and learn things together, that it could really thrive as an art piece. And now I end the essay with another quote by Jon Cates:

“Those systems might be broken, they might be glitched, and they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. But still they are functional or functioning in one way or another systematically. So they are connected to one another as assemblages.”

— Jon Cates, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates by Randall Packer

We live in a world where social media is, simply putting, the root of the existence of many. The lives of many are shown, and seeing how many of these artists are trying to make use of the idea of social broadcasting to allow others to look deeper into their lives, I realise that humans are all flawed individuals who basically are artistic in the way they are made. To look into the way humans react through a medium that they would normally be honest on, be it on an anonymous platform, allows one to study the raw intensity of the human emotion. They bounce off each other, and together, are able to function as a whole human race. This is what I have found interesting after the three days of Symposium, and I am glad to have found a chance to have been part of this, even if I was merely part of the audience. Thank you for the opportunity.

 

References

Packer, R. (2014, July 16). Glitch Expectations: A Conversation with Jon Cates. Retrieved April 06, 2018, from https://hyperallergic.com/134709/glitch-expectations-a-conversation-with-jon-cates/

Packer, R. (2018). Program. Retrieved April 06, 2018, from https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/program/

 

micro-project 7 // o k a y

April 1, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

 

Music credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cw_YAHwcf8

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

In this video I am in my room, writing in my journal, and as I continue to write words, they start to lose their meaning. The music playing in the background is a song called ‘good day’, played at a slower speed, creating a slow rhythm and eventually, a sense of distortion to the perception of time. There’s a sense of dissociative blurriness as the VHS filter glitches every so often, with its red, blue, white, black.

A room is a safe space. The music conceals yet shows the confusion that I have collected over my year in university. The writings are what I want to be, but cannot achieve, because OK has lost all of its meaning.

I have never dabbled into the world of art, not in the way most people have. I went into art with a lack of deeper meaning, and have never known art in its contemporary form. As I stare longer at meanings that people try to bring forward, the repetitiveness to causes gets lost within me. In a sense, this video selfie would be the workings of my mind as I process how people view art. I realise that I am not that individual, but I am also the individual. I realise that what I show — a person who can speak, who can smile and write coherently – is not like that within the self, and thus creates that alternate identity. I lost myself in coming to the realisation that art was not what I thought it was. I concealed myself with the idea of coherency in my own words of reassurance, but when you look long enough, the depth of it is gone.

As deep as I may sound, I wish to create art for my, somewhat shallow, individual. To present what I see of the world, from what I perceive which has lost its initial meaning. To reconstruct things in what my mind was able to pick up, and to better understand other individuals, I evaluate them with what my overactive, overthinking mind can comprehend.

tl;dr, I’m dumb, and I wish to understand people better but it’s hard because people all talk like ^ until I also cannot understand. Help.

 

micro-project 6 // a day in the life of super-participation

April 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

PAGE LINK: https://www.facebook.com/napndonth/

Our page: Nap And Do Nothing.

Members: Karen, Naomi, Nok Wan, Celine

(did not post it previously sorry)

As observed, all of the group members were more superficial about sharing, while half of us were unwilling to post pictures of our faces, opting for videos and pictures of what was around us instead, or the faces of friends whom happened to be around us. We were also kept “anonymous”, choosing to not write our names, using the page’s admin anonymity to hide behind. (We could, however, look at who posted the various posts, with our administrator roles.) Many of our posts were updates about what we were doing, things like eating, going to the toilet, or sleeping. These were all mundane activities, and there was the occasional talk about spending time with a friend. Many of these posts involve things we have already spoke about to the people around us. There was also the rare thought about something that had happened, and a comment that was empathetic in relation.

So this micro-project is about being a super-participant. So what is super-participation to me? I’d like to think it’s about the concept of over-sharing, and about the need for transparency in order to be accepted and validated as a whole being. I thought it was a very interesting topic to touch on. When we were kids, we were often told to “not talk to strangers”, and since that was inevitable with the rise of the Interwebz, parents compromised. Do not give unnecessary information, do not put your feelings out there, do not put your real name. Basically we had to keep our private details away from this public space.

Of course, this changed over time, and for the past few years, many internet celebrities have put every single little detail about themselves onto social media, be it sexuality, transitions into new lives as progressive adults, mental health issues, relationships and its details, etc. Some try to keep it slightly more personal, only having mutual friends on the web know about their personal lives, while some just let the whole world know about what they think about a certain thing, or what they are going through with the certain point in their lives.

Likewise, this has influenced the way many of our generation view the internet — everyone was freely sharing whatever they were doing, whatever they were feeling, at any given time. And this is what we did in our project.

experimental interaction // Research Critique 3

March 18, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

https://youtu.be/16l7RQVbDsE

Members: Joey, Amanda, Celine

In what way has our project embraced problems, inconsistencies and accidents, I’d say that with acceptance, we, for one, didn’t keep with similar video orientations and dimensions. We accepted each person’s style of edit, making use of it to create a sense of instability and discomfort to our viewers. As Rosa Menkman says,

“Glitch studies attempts to balance nonsense and knowledge. It searches for the unfamiliar while at the same time it tries to de-familiarize the familiar. This studies can show what is acceptable behavior and what is outside of acceptance or the norm.”

— Rosa Menkman, “Glitch Studies Manifesto”

It’s through this attempt at making the familiar extremely out of the norm, the idea of making you turn your head back to look at it a second time, because you realise something was wrong. BUT! You didn’t realise what was wrong to begin with, untill you looked at it the second time. We gave you scenes of ADM, but with the right edits, it made ADM a little weird, a little wonky, and that was what created a new perspective in the video.

In our project, we decided to use video as our base format, and tried to create a sense of unbalance within the balance of normalcy. Walking around ADM, each of us took our own set of videos, based on what we felt was weird, shaking our devices or leaving them entirely still. We then edited them individually, to create a sense of glitch within the video cuts themselves. This involved either increasing or decreasing the speed, reversing them, or changing the visual aspect of it (changing the levels, adding music, etc).

There was a sense of mind deterioration, where normalcy was disrupted, as well as the idea of the destruction using video editing.

I would like to quote Chip Lord,

“It was more about the power of that image, what it would mean. And of course we have all experienced the actual moments, or days following the assassination, as sophomores in college in 1963.”

— Chip Lord, “Interview with Chip Lord” by Randall Packer

By creating The Eternal Frame, Ant Farm recreated a very powerful moment in American history. For one, the actual murder must have been a very sensitive topic to many, as he mentioned that there were many individuals who were against the type of works they were doing. It explores the distorting nature of media representation in which reality and fiction blend, using a ‘mockumentary’ style of filming. To recreate a scene that had been the childhood of many Americans, it gave a sense of power in something bizarre —  having a coloured HD version of the same moment from a decade ago (as well as a man in drag). It brought questions to the audience, and allowed them to rethink their ideas of the moment that the murder had happened. 

It was looking at a photo or a film and realising its many mistakes, for what ‘could have been solved’, or what ‘could have been retold’. It was giving a new layer of perspectives and opinions that one would not have looked at again if it was merely ‘perfect’.

And with this, I go by this quote by Jon Cates,

“Those systems might be broken, they might be glitched, and they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems.”

— Jon Cates, “Glitch Expectations” by Randall Packer

I am a fan of Korean idols, and recently found a music video which I found really interesting. At first glance, it was a typical song about apology, showing a pretty face with a pretty video.

But on closer inspection, I realise that the idol moved weirdly, and there were times when the video quality was that of a old handheld video-cam. It gave the whole music video a very eery feel, and suddenly it felt very personal, when it dawned upon me that it was a robot being styled to look like the idol. It was so uncanny that it creeped me out, along with the shaky videos and glitches, it was like looking at a scientist’s experiment video. Throughout the music video, the robot apologises, her lips move (although out of sync) and her head jerks (although extremely unnaturally) to imitate that of a living being. It was a very powerful message about being forced to be how everyone wanted her to be, and with this uncanny effect, gave strong feelings to the viewer, that they ‘forced’ her to be like a robot who was ordered around and emotionless.

I feel like this links back to the quote mentioned earlier. Without the glitchy videos and the dysfunctional robot, the video would not have had the same effect, and that makes it attractive in its own way.

If you ever want to watch it here’s the video:

MIANHAE (Sorry) by Heize

 

 

micro-project 5 // the art of d e s t r u c t i o n

March 6, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Members: Amanda, Joey, Celine

The three of us decided to use videos to glitch, walking around ADM and taking videos of the most random things. We tried taking still videos, and also very jumpy cryptid videos where there were many motion blurs. After taking these videos, and also looking like we weren’t that right in the heads, we each took our own videos and edited short clips on our own, creating our own form of glitch, while also making a gradual slip of sanity when compiled together.  Throughout the final video there is a sense of destruction in the mind, and also in the video itself.

experimental interaction // exquisite glitch

February 19, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Describe how this process of collective image creation and decomposition creates a glitch transformation.

My group members were Nok Wan, Amanda and Minjee. We were told to create a glitch using any sort of method available, although most of us used photoshop, creating the effect of glitch in the images shown above.

Creating this piece was an unfamiliar experience to all of us: we weren’t computers ourselves. Our first round of edits usually ended up very safe. An example would have been my own edit of Nok Wan’s image, where I was unwilling to distort her face for fear that it would ruin a Masterpiece. We didn’t want to make it seem unrecognisable right from the start. I started off with adding on by duplicating parts of the image, and adding rectangles of colour that seemed like it was a glitch. I added a noise layer as well, as glitch was commonly associated with heavy noise, in my perception. Some others would also change the colours of the image, rather than affect the image itself, to colours that were not normal for a human to have (cyans, purples, etc.).

As the image gets passed down from person to person, some are more daring than others and started distorting faces. Or they tend to add on even more, or maybe even took away some elements. When the face started getting more and more unrecognisable, however, people started getting more daring with their pieces, going to more distortable options like liquify.

 

How is each transformation creating a new form of its precursor?

I realised that everyone had their own ways of creating glitches. For me, I loved the idea of repetition in glitch, like when you dragged a window and your computer started lagging and everything started to just become an animation broken down frame by frame, and then melded together.

From the above images, you could slowly tell that the only thing visible from my original image was the little streaks of darker hair becoming just some sort of texture — you could not tell that it was my hair at all, if you did not know what the original image was. It became some sort of psychedelic poster you would see on the streets, probably just had to smack on some text. The colours were very bright and vibrant, and the contrasts in colours used were very drastic. Which I actually liked a lot to begin with, because in my opinion pastels were an overrated thing. Nothing wrong with pastel glitches those are cool as well, but hey, I just basically find the colour palettes used in typical glitches really cool.

It also doesn’t help that constantly resaving jpegs can basically fry a photo. The constant edits take a toll on the resolution and I actually find it really pretty. Never found a better self portrait, man. :’-)

 

experimental interaction // Research Critique 2

February 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Link:

https://www.facebook.com/amanda.oh.5283/videos/1996232647296283/

“Gradually they realised that they could arrange to telematically meet friends and relatives living on the opposite coast. Eventually, whole families would meet their distant loved ones through the ‘Hole’, some of whom had not seen each other for several years.”

— Maria Chatzichristodoulou, about the ‘Hole-in-Space’

What is the third space to you?

To me, the third space would be to share a moment with someone, even if we were not in the same physical space. It is the idea of being on a virtualised platform, and to sit together to eat and talk and basically become associated with one another, or possibly reconnect with someone else, as mentioned in the quote above.

How do we collapse boundaries in the third space?

In our tele-drift project, Amanda and I shared a drink despite being in a totally different location, and crossed boundaries to “physically” show our emotions. We were communicating verbally through the third space, but adding the physical factor of reaching out to each other, literally. This was what collapsed the boundaries, similar to how “Hole-in-Space” connected old friends and families. Our willingness to share with one another what we normally could not (given the distance): touch and the act of sharing at the same moment, rather than sending a can of milo through mail.

How do we create closeness and intimacy in the third space despite being in different locations?

“But most startling is the fact that the third space is simply an integral fact of everyday life in the 21st century.”

— Randall Packer, The Third Space

With reference to the quote, to me, closeness would be the normalcy of everyday life. The fact that someone was able to share with me a very normal task despite being in a different location was a very intimate moment for me. It felt like the two of us were in close proximity and that we were not actually that far apart, and considering that we were so fascinated with the idea of being able to share made the experience all the more refreshing – like an exciting new touch to a typically mundane activity.

How did you virtually touch, hold objects, create a “third” body using different gestures despite being in different locations?

While holding a conversation, we would use our own body parts to represent the other’s while acting out what was requested of us. Likewise with the milo can, Amanda and I used our own hands to hold onto a can of milo and despite them being different milo cans, it still felt like “sharing”, when we passed it to each other and drank it, often asking if the other wanted a sip.

How did you “connect” and collaborate with one another remotely in this third space?

It gave the illusion that we were sitting right next to each other, or in front of each other. It felt like we were truly communicating what each of us wanted from the conversation, and in order to achieve a certain goal, we collaborated in a way we might not have done so easily in a normal, physical space.

“When we can no longer separate the real and the virtual (the post real), when the third space is just the way things are, well, that in sum is the current state of evolution.”

— Randall Packer, The Third Space

The idea that we were able to create that illusion was like, a peek into the realisation that the real and virtual could end up seeming inseparable, and while daunting, could bring across new possibilities in business opportunities, and more importantly, intimacy — something that seemed to have been lost after social media took over our lives.

Micro-project 3

February 5, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Pair: Amanda and Celine

Link to our video:

Posted by Amanda Oh on Monday, 29 January 2018

https://www.facebook.com/amanda.oh.5283/videos/1996232647296283/

Sitting at two different ends of the ADM basement, we wanted to make it seem as if we sharing a common space despite being in two different locations. Having had a long day of classes, it was a good time to ‘share a drink’ and what better way to share a cold can of milo than through the internet?

WHERE
ADM basement
Amanda: Outside, at the black benches
Celine: Green tables near 3D room

WHAT
Share a drink, help to open drink, have a conversation and eventually finish the drink!

OUTCOME

Amanda and Celine are seen being able to pass a can of milo through this Third Space, despite not physically being in the same space. This allowed for them to share one of our favourite drinks: Milo. Amanda is seen being unable to open the milo can early on in the video, and passes it to Celine, who opens it for Amanda and returns it to her to have the first sip. They then attempt to have conversation verbally, occasionally high-fiving and hitting each other on the head. Amanda also attempts to pat Celine’s head in apology for hitting the latter’s head. Towards the end of the video, Celine asks for Amanda’s watch, so she could look at the time and stop the video. Successfully, they end the conversation and finish their one can of milo through facebook live. What a concept.

CONS

  • Awkwardness sitting in a place with a lot of people. They kept trying to talk to us!
  • Sometimes we forgot that we had to have the milo can leave the screen, so we had double milo.
  • We sometimes couldn’t hear each other and had to ask the other to repeat.
  • Facebook Live suddenly did not show the time, so we could not tell how long we had been live.

PROS

  • We had milo
  • And a lot of fun
  • Bless the internet

EXPERIENCES

It was an exciting maiden experience. Even though we were not actually near each other in any way, there was still that form of connection that certainly made the whole interaction very new and refreshing. Every little successful connection made us elated, and we would burst into laughter. Even failures were met with laughter, and we would then try again. It was a lot about impromptu communication as well, where we had to voice what we wanted and work as a team to achieve it. Overall, it really felt like we were adding a new layer to ‘video-calling’, like some sort of Virtual Reality chat but with a new sense of touch and share added to it.

experimental interaction // Research Critique 1

February 4, 2018 / / 0 Comments

It’s Storytime!

Let’s create a story together!! 🙂

We worked on our Micro-Project #2 on 22/01 and managed to execute it on 29/01. Joey, Naomi, Nok Wan and myself created a game that involved everyone in the classroom to create a story together.

The Rules.

Every audience member was allowed to write a maximum of two sentence with a time limit of thirty seconds, in sequential order. One by one, they add on to a story being formed together by their peers before them, and at the very end we get to read what they have written. Instead of allowing the audience to have Ultimate Freedom what could be written, our team decided to give the audience some variables to accomplish. For example, we gave the first audience member to start the story a genre, and gave someone in the middle of the “queue” something to add.

Also, by the end of the story, the audience have to somehow work together and make sure a character disappeared, along with a plot twist.

The variables to aid the audience.

Compared to the traditional way of writing a story where a writer creates their own world from beginning to end, nothing was planned ahead – even us as the ‘artists’, did not know what would have been the end result. We were as clueless about how it would go and had no pre-assumptions to how it would have ended. As co-creators of a story, everyone had to work together to make sure that each sentence they made linked to the next, along with the assumption of what the previous co-creator was thinking.

Depending on how one would think, a story can take a drastic turn, and eventually affects how the other co-creators will write the story. It was like creating an infinite pathway, but with each different co-creator, a route was then formed, resulting in the finished story.

The Story.

As Marc Garrett has mentioned in the D.I.W.O article,

“The practice of DIWO allows space for an openness where a rich mixing of components from different sources crossover and build a hybrid experience.”

As mentioned earlier, each co-creator’s contribution could possibly be a dramatic twist. Even though one of our requirements was to create a plot twist, it was evident that what happened down the lane of creation, that what the first co-creator had assumed was not anything like the final outcome. It works the same way vice-versa where a waiting co-creator ends up looking at a piece of work-in-progress that was nothing like they expected. They have to read through everything and decide on a sentence that could create a question in the next person’s head. It was like a constant process of questions and answers not by one person’s hand, but by many: a discussion going on within that one moment of working together without actually conversing.

Our crowd-sourced artwork was certainly different in the sense that it was a literary piece of art. We also gave variables to create a higher level of ‘difficulty’, as a game, but also to guide the ‘players’, also known as co-creators, so they have a rough idea of what to create within 30 seconds.

Lei working hard 🙂

It was very similar to how the Human Clock made use of co-creator’s ability to create their own pieces to contribute to a bigger project. In our artwork, the audience has their own power to change the story in any way they like, just like how the Human Clock gave their audience the authority to manipulate the picture in any way they wanted, as long as it had the numbers necessary to form the artwork (the necessary ‘variables’ for this piece.)

Like-wise, it was similar to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, where co-creator by co-creator, their options would be affected by the one in front of them. In Cut Piece, when someone were to cut a piece of sleeve off and there was no more sleeve to cut, the following person would not be able to cut any more sleeve, and decide to cut another piece of clothing instead. In our artwork, if someone were to mention that a character had already disappeared, then the next few people would not be able to mention a disappearance, and rethink their sentences again.

I hope everyone had fun!