INTERACTION – belladaiyunlang

April 22, 2018April 22, 2018

Third Space Fallacy

A Third Space Fallacy is an experimental interaction performance on third and first space that combines the responses collated on the third space through Instagram polls and stories to curate the next move in a friendship conflict between two girls, Bella and Daphne. To make the entire performance as real as possible, both girls had to put up an act in the span of 1 week in the first space, when questions arise from the people around them. Also, to stage that this is not part of our project for Experimental Interaction, our group have created another Instagram account @abracadabrrun, collating uninformed decisions made by our followers, which is part of the narrative of the death of Bella.

Conceptualization

Initially, I had an idea of having a social media game at Changi Airport, however, we rethink after receiving the comment of my critique on the online Symposium, Are We in LOVE with the Connectedness? from our professor Randall Packer.

“Very interesting how you expressed your thoughts on interaction in such personal terms: how we engage emotionally in the third space. This has been one of the key ideas we have discussed this semester, how meaningful interaction can be achieved despite geographical separation. Wasn’t this proved when you elected not to interact in the chat for Annie Abrahams’ performance, and found yourself removed and disconnected. This implies that is direct interaction that creates the quality of engagement in any form of interactive art. Perhaps it would be interesting and helpful to your thesis to applied this to Blast Theory’s work: how the players and performers engage in something dynamic, arresting, and challenging in both physical and virtual spaces. ”

– Comment on Are We in LOVE with the Connectedness? Randall Packer

Randall Packer mentioned that the emotional engagement in the third space has been one of the key ideas we learned in this semester. It got my group mates and me into thinking. How can we emotionally engage our audience? The answer is DRAMA. Some people love drama because it is something that might not really happen in real life or the exaggerated version of the real-life event. It catches people’s eyes, trigger their emotions, and sometimes it is just entertainment.

We chose Instagram as the main media for our piece. We decided to use our personal account in order to make the drama seems real, and let people participate unconsciously. Thus, we could receive real emotions from our audience, or while interacting with them.

Firstly, we scripted the characters and the rough/possible storyline. The two characters, Bella (acted by Bella) and Daphne (acted by Daphne) are the bullied and bully in this friendship drama. They are old friends from Secondary School. Daphne had been taking advantage of the kindness and dependability of Bella since they met. Then, they happened to be on the same course and university. The conflict started with Bella exposing her toxic friendship on her Insta-story. The rough storyline is that Bella expressed her anger towards the friendship, and asking for solutions online, while Daphne got annoyed by clingy Bella and also started ranting and asking for help on her social media. The ending of the drama could be happy, sad, tragic, and etc. depended on the choices our audience made.

Execution

We only had two weeks for this group project, and we started building up the tension on Instagram a week before the critique day.

I posted the first story to complain about the toxic friendship and 45 out of 145 viewers voted for this post. The opinions are make it clear and just let it go. Participant Including strangers as my account is public.

Also, people were replying to this post. 4 people were showing concern, 1 was curious and 1 was giving the constructive solution to my situation. Then we decided our next move base on the result we obtain.

Daphne also posted emotional stories and ask her followers to vote for her.

The social media rant lasted for days until my followers voted me to find her in real life. I found Daphne at Jurong Point by stalking her Insta-stories. We got into a fight there as her followers voted her to confront me. She left me there with hurtful words as she was angry that I kept following her and contacting her.

In order to make it more convincing as people were doubting that our drama is our Experimental Project, we made an Instagram account and used our initial idea to create a fake game. Also, the blind decision people had made actually led to my suicide and the way I suicide.

Our social media drama reached the climax with my last emotional posts. I left social media for 18 hours, as I committed suicide in the third space. I received 5 replies that showed concerns and other messages from friends.

The game ended with the launch of our trailer video on youtube and our message.

We received emotional replies from our friends after they found out the truth. One friend actually told me that she did not participate in the voting but she actually followed the whole story.

Discovery & Exploration

This piece of social media performance is experimental, as it is only 30% staged. The audience has the most control over the narrative. Our intention is to test the impact of social media, how it affects our life emotionally and create the awareness that our behaviors on social media could lead to serious consequences. We were surprised that how powerful Insta-story is. The image and text we created were able to convince people around us even our closed friends who see us almost every day. It is interesting how easy we could shape our digital identity that is totally different from our real personality. Also, people actually brought the third space drama into the first space to engage more people. They talked about the story and also tried to have their opinion towards our situation. Daphne and I needed to be in our characters in real life.

To conclude this project, we applied what we learned in this semester into this social media performance. We exposed our emotions online and created our new digital identities. We engaged our audience unconsciously in both first and third space. Everyone DIWOed this piece of performance, as we, the artists only created the outline and platform. Lastly, I think the role of artists is to make the world a better regardless of our area of disciplines. Furtherfield helped refugee through the power of Internet, raised the awareness of the environmental issue, Media Burnt was conveying the issue of mass media, and Hasan Elahi spread his story of discrimination online. As young artists, we also like to raise the question of how we should use social media, and how we can avoid social media tragedy to happen in the future through this project.

April 5, 2018April 6, 2018

Are We in LOVE with the Connectedness?

What is love? What makes you fall in love? A lot of people tell me that love is the connection. Having the connection gives the feeling of belonging to a particular person or group. Communication is probably the key to create the connection. Our ancestors created languages for better communication and invented methods and tools to help with communication including, pigeon post, letter, telegraph, satellite technology, and the Internet.

Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/images/slideshow/2008/12/gallery_participation/04_holeinspace.jpg

In 1980, memorable moments were made through satellite technologies. Two big screens were set up on the two sides the United States. People at New York and Los Angeles had their live broadcasting for the first time with strangers, friends, and the loved ones. There were several emotional connections between people who were 2789 miles apart. I realized how beautiful connection is when I did the research at the beginning of the experimental interaction class on this piece of performance art, Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. I named it The Mother of Facetime.

According to John Durham Peters, broadcasting is a tool used for dissemination, which the main source is spread to one large audience without the exchange of dialogue in between. The audience only has the choices to listen, analyze or just ignore the information. Over time, the centralized one-to-many broadcasting seems to be replaced by the peer-to-peer interactions that join the artist and audiences in the third space.

For instance, the online Symposium, collaboration of the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore), and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Performance (US). The three-day event from 29th to 31st March 2018, gathered international artists to share their artwork, thoughts and answered questions from the audience on Adobe Connect.

Thursday, Day 1 of the Symposium https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/p2hoimc6en3/

On the first day, Annie Abrahams, the Scienartist I researched on in my previous short essay, created a performance during the online Symposium. The performance connected a group of international artists who stay in different countries. It started with them reading their latencies with the black screen and the blue frame flashing. Annie Abrahams mentioned that she gave freedom to the performer, as she only gives rules and there is no directing. Annie Abrahams also commented that we know that the performers are not in the same space and time, yet we can still make something with entanglement between machine and people. In the following scene, artists showed different objects in the similar framing on their screen. We can see the connection and similarity in framing although those items were actually far apart in different countries.

Meanwhile, the conversation carried on in the chat room. Some were the clarifications of the performance from the hosts, some were questions, and some were just sharing thoughts. It seems to be outside of the performance but it somehow complimented it as the audience was able to connect and got to know others’ opinions. The decentralized and non-hierarchical modes of interaction gave the audience equal chance to connect with the artists and the other audience over the world.

Further, I had a mini experiment on the first day of the online Symposium. I decided not to join the chat room in the online Symposium, as I participated in Annie Abrahams’s online performance in my Experimental Interaction class organized by my professor Randall Packer. I would like to see the difference without participation. In the end, I found that I lost my interests and I actually felt excluded. My personal experience might not be enough to prove anything, but interaction is probably one of the keys to creating the connection in the “alternative social world”.

Day 2 of the Symposium https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/p64havp11a9/

Another example that created the connection is the game Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory in 2003. During that period, online games were developed in new genres like social games, mobile games and etc. In this game, the online and street players collaborated to find Uncle Roy before being invited to make a commitment to a stranger. The street player held a mobile device that shows the real-time location and the online play could be able to see the street player and guide him or her to find uncle Roy. They communicated with each other via online text and audio messages. At the end of the game over 500 players out of 723 total players made a commitment to be there for another player for the next 12 months. Matt Adams shared with us on the second day of the online Symposium that this game gave people opportunity to play with the relationship that they might create. Some people treated it as a game while some think it was real and actually had commitments for over 12 months. How interesting that people could be connected easily in the third space.

https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvYXNzZXRzLzk4YWMwYjkwMGZkYzM5NTI1YV8xNi4gTWVkaWEgQnVybiwgcGhvdG8gSm9obiBGLiBUdXJuZXIuSlBHIl0sWyJwIiwiY29udmVydCIsIi1xdWFsaXR5IDgxIC1hdXRvLW9yaWVudCJdLFsicCIsInRodW1iIiwiMTI4MHg-Il1d/16.%20Media%20Burn%2C%20photo%20John%20F.%20Turner.JPG

Numerous interesting artworks were made with the revolution of communication. Many memorable moments were captured. However, some said love without hate is not true love. Back in 1975, artists from Ant Farm expressed their attitude towards the mass media through Media Burn, a performance art that a Cadillac drove through a mountain of television. My research on that artwork made me questioned: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your mobile phone? Since our daily life seems to be dominated by our phone and the internet. We are so attracted to the connections and interactions we can easily make in the third space. Everything seems so lively yet not seems 100% real, as some treats it as games while some actually make commitments just like how people view the game Roy All Around You.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

All in all, It is hard not to fall in love with someone or something you can connect with. It is hard to deny that the connection that interaction creates is beautiful and attractive. It is hard to change the reality that the third space is dominating our daily life. Many are obsessed with it, while some are against it. After going through the journey in Experimental Interaction class. I think the best solution so far of my own question “Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your mobile phone?” is probably to build a new perspective to see the art of social practice. To see the beauty of connectedness we can build through those great human inventions.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcasting

Gene Youngblood and the Unfinished Communications Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_game#History

https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/p2hoimc6en3/

https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/p64havp11a9/

Live Art and Telematics: The Promise of Internationalism

Uncle Roy All Around You

February 7, 2018February 7, 2018

E-Connect

I would like to give a name to this screenshot, e-connect. A lot of things in our daily life are going “e” (Electronic) because of technology. For example, e-mail, e-ticket, e-commerce and etc.. Technology improves the quality and efficiency of our lives. Today, we are able to connect with each other easily in the third space which the technology creates.

Last week, I had my e-connect experience in class. It was my first DIWO experience with Adobe Connect. We did several activities with each other, one example is making a cross on the screen as the photo above. We decided to make a cross with the guidance of our professor Randall Packer. A few minutes were taken for us to agree to do it, figure out how to achieve the effect, and tell each other “wait, don’t move! I need to take screenshots”.

Furthermore, we discussed our feelings in class, and received a word that worth million dollars from Randall Packer, “Negotiation”. It made me think about why negotiation is so important. It sounds like a big world yet it seems to be what we are using on the daily basis. It is simply looking for a deal that makes everyone happy. It is beneficial for us to master the skills of negotiation, as most of the artworks would involve more than one participants. For instance, art history group presentation. The first thing we do after forming a group is probably creating the WhatsApp group, where we can negotiate how we are going to contribute to the project in the third space. Good negotiation will give everyone a good group project experience and vice versa.

All in all, negotiation is essential as we are living in the society where it is almost impossible to avoid collaborations. Also, the existence of the third space had improved the quality of negotiation base on my experience in class and daily life.

November 23, 2017

FOUNDATION 4D PROJECT 4: POETICS OF TIME

PROJECT BRIEF

Choose a specific location in ADM, and create an encounter with any medium that expresses one of the following categories of time. 1. Measured time 2. Experienced time 3. Edited time 4. Biological time.

OVERVIEW

I started this project with research on two artists, Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramovic who are the pioneers of performance art. I decided to have a performance art for this project after having a better understanding of it. Due to time constraints, my performance was recorded and presented in the form of installation. The purpose of this performance is to cause realization of the current issues. INDIVIDUALISATION

PROJECT PROPOSAL

PROJECT 4 PROPOSAL

PROCESS

I had 21 meals alone for 15 days, as I skipped some and there were technical issues for a few meals that were not recorded. All the video clips were edited to the similar scales to keep the consistency. The edited video was presented in the installation is 2 hours 11 minutes in clock time.

There is a speed up version of part of the original video. The scale and framing are able to capture my movement and the environment. There is no surprise in this artwork as all my movements are similar. The regular movement suggests my oppressive emotion, and also form a contrast to the irregular movement in the background. The contrast of an individual against the group emphasized my loneliness.

DINING ENVIRONMENT REFERENCE https://www.pinterest.com/pin/490118371940344390/

DINING ENVIRONMENT REFERENCE https://www.pinterest.com/pin/490118371940344355/

TRIAD COLOURS http://www.tigercolor.com/Images/Triad.gif

Moreover, the deliverable of this project is an installation of my recorded performance. I created a dining environment for my audience to experience the artwork. The images above are my references. The style of the dining environment is colourful and bright like where a group of friends normal hang out at. I used two orange, two green chairs, and one white table for my installation to achieve the ideal effect. I chose the colours according to colour theory that triad colour which are green, violet and orange to create the playful environment.

MENU REFERENCE https://www.pinterest.com/pin/490118371940398927/

Further, text is used in my installation to clarify the content and emphasize my emotion. I wrote down my feeling after every meal and consolidate those into a menu-like sheet with the performance art title and other information. It was placed on the white table for the audience to read while they are watching the video. Some small notes were also placed on the table to deliver my message to the audience.

FINAL INSTALLATION

The installation lasted for 2 hours and 11 minutes started from 1230pm on 20th November 2017 at ADM level 2 outside 2D studio. I invited my friend for lunch at my installation. That was my first time eating with friends in 15 days. My friends and classmates had pizza with me and also shared their opinions with me. The whole installation was recorded by Gopro. There is a five-minute video of some moment above as I could not be able to upload the whole 2 hours video.

ALL IN ALL

This is the first time that I am having performance art and installation. I was always curious about those in the past. Finally, there was a chance for me to do so. Eating alone seems to be an easy task but it is difficult for me as I am an extrovert person who loves to socialize. I am also self-conscious that I care about how people think of me. Putting myself in the situation without company in the public is torture. I felt insecure when I was eating alone. In addition, I did not expect that this performance art would affect my social life that much. I missed several chances to enjoy great food with friends because I need to follow the rules I set. Actually, I only spent around 2 hours in total eating alone but I felt like the time was double. It is because those experiences are unpleasant. However, I felt that time past faster when I was sharing food with friends at the installation. This project is interesting that I never think about time in depth as it is just something we experience every day. I appreciate that we actually have the ability to design time. Lastly, I think this project also helped me to discover my potential, and decide my major.

September 1, 2017September 1, 2017

PROJECT 1: PICTURE STORY – CURATING SELF

PROJECT BRIEF

Accomplish the three tasks with various manipulation techniques in photography.

TASK1: ME

I used to be concerned very much about the judgments from others. It is like a tattoo that is indelible on my skin. I tried so hard to get it away. Eventually, I realized that the problems were not from anywhere else but myself. Happiness is my choice, which has nothing to do with others’ opinions. Why not just KEEP CALM AND EAT ICE CREAM!

In the test shots, I did experiment using a brow colour eyeliner that has a soft texture. After the consultation, I realized that the words written on my face were not harsh enough to express the emotion.

Thus, I changed the media to a black waterproof liquid eyeliner, and it looks more like tattoos. The font I used in the final shots is sharp, straight and messy. It creates an uneasy and unfriendly feeling as compared to the test shots. Further, I explored the different composition, and facial expression to achieve the best results. For instance, the first photo in this series was chosen because of its negative space that creates the focal point on my facial expression as well as its cropping below my eyes, which draws more attention to the emotion.

Inspiration from CHANEL’s Gabrielle bag campaign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4YzMQGkgM8

Additionally, the framing and arrangement of this series are inspired by CHANEL’s Gabrielle bag campaign. The first photo in this series was taken as portrait and rotated into a landscape photo. Its composition might seems wrong as we see the human in an upright manner normally. The ‘problem’ here hints the problem that I was facing. My figure gradually turns back to upright, which shows I am back to the right track.

TASK2: Object and Representation of Self

“We think with the objects we love: we love the object we think with.”

– THE THINGS THAT MATTER

According to the dictionary, an object is a material thing that can be seen and touched. For me, it is not just something that I can use but a companion to my emotional life. The object that I attach to the most is my earpiece. I bring it along with me not just because of the good sound quality. It companied me during the long boring rides when I was eating alone, and even helped me to get away with some awkward situation.

The test shots were taken to try out the framing and emotion. Several feedbacks were gathered during the consultation, which I had improved in the final shots.

The photos in this series are in different scale which tells the different story about the object and me. The long and medium shots here is to capture the environment, and how I react to the environment when I am interacting with the object. While the close-up shots capture the emotion with some environment. Moreover, many photos were taken to test the body gesture, facial expression and etc. Some are cropped from original shots to achieve a better effect. A few scenes in the background were captured accidentally, which I think is the interesting part of this Project.

TASK3: My World

I moved to Singapore years ago by myself. Sometimes, I am confused that where I actually belong to. There is one place here that when thought the ups and downs with me, which is Chinatown. It is like my wonderland, where I can escape from the reality.

At first, I was quite stuck at this task. I went to Chinatown for several times but have no idea what to focus on. Everything seems equal and it is difficult to spot the high light until my professor pointed out some of the test shots.

Night scene in Spirited Away written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki http://www.misucell.com/group/spirited-away-wallpapers/

People visit Chinatown mainly for the food. All the sign board lighted up with different designs. Some are hung horizontally, while some are vertical. A few restaurants even have more than one sign board. It seems like a competition that everyone wants to stand out. It reminds me of the movie that I watched for hundreds time since young, Spirited Away written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. There are some scenes when night falls, and night life starts. The background is so dim, yet the street seems so alive with the lights. That was how I feel when I walked around Chinatown like walking in the movie scene.

ALL IN ALL

This project is challenging as I need to convey the message as accurate as possible through a few photos. I was stuck at some point but able to find a solution with the suggestions from professor, classmates, and friends. Through this project, I started to pay more attention to details, the meaning behind as well as the mentality of the curator and how it can inspire me. Lastly, the techniques that I learned in class helped me to execute the tasks more accurate and efficient as I know the purposes of different scales and framing.