Tag: glitch

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/

 

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. :’-)