Research

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Third Space Fallacy, an Introduction

[About]

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 arises 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.

Communication Through Social Broadcasting, A Preface

Computers, Changing the Way Art is Viewed

… if the first computer was the abacus, the ultimate computer will be the sublime aesthetic device: a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotions. -Gene Youngblood

Yes, it is obvious that in today’s world, technology and the “screens” have taken over the world instead of the evil ones… or is the former the evil ones?

A group of us got the privilege to attend the international Art of the Network Practice Online symposium over the course of 3 days, of which I had attended day 1: Keynote by Maria X and internet performance by Annie Abraham, who we got to work with for a previous internet performance with her in class, and day 3: Internet performance by Jon Cates and his collaborators.

But the chisel, brush, and canvas are passive media whereas the computer is an active participant in the creative process -Gene Youngblood

While the traditional mediums are submissive to the creation of work, the computer remains on par with the creators of art. Though there was a fixed linear way of the interaction of art in the past (and still occurring), whereby the audience only gets to interact with it after it is done up in the studio, this audience interaction with the art piece and the creation of art can now occur concurrently. That being said, the computer remains the one that will perform under instructions and rules, codes and hypertext markup language. Annie Abrahams’ Online En-semble -Entanglement Training shows how a performance can be put up on the Third Space, and how audience interaction and the creation of art can now occur concurrently.

Annie Abrahams’ Online En-semble – Entanglement Training

In Annie Abrahams’ Online En-semble – Entanglement Training, entanglement is accepted, embraced and celebrated. A performance that needs the collaboration and the compromise of the collaborators, this performance shows clearly how it cannot be done without DIWO and the Third Space, concepts that are greatly emphasized. As the subject matter of the online performance, latency, something that is hard to take control of, takes over instead of being suppressed. Latency being understood as “the wait time introduced by the signal travelling the geographical distance as well as over the various pieces of communications equipment.”

The collaborators took turns to report their latency and saying “excellent”.

Her collaborators come from different countries who possess different cultural backgrounds, where they are connected on the Third Space through Adobe Connect itself on Thursday night, 29 April 2017. In the online performance, latency was observed. The collaborators had to accept the disruption, act upon it and make do with the imperfection. The protocol was to have the collaborators take turns to report their latency in their connection. Also, her protocols were simple for the performance, that allowed for the free-play and the authenticity of her collaborators.

The collaborators were in-sync as they showed their hands on their webcams.

What the mass then realize was that it was tough for them to be in the Third Space all at the same time, despite seemingly being connected to one another through the visuals. They embraced the glitches, the lag-time, creating a new paradigm dismissing the events where disruptions and wait are detested. Just like the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, Online En-semble: Entanglement Training captured the beauty of disorientations, turn it a hundred and eighty degrees, creating a mesmerizing choreographed internet piece. Although there was a point in the symposium that Annie Abrahams microphone was not working the way she wanted it to, I thought it gave a perfect touch to the piece, aptly applying to the very objective of Online En-semble: Entanglement Training, the ultimate test of the entanglement training itself. Rather than considering it as a katakana, it was taken in as part of the piece. Annie Abrahams successfully took the minor keys of the internet and composed an internet piece with a perfect harmony, a harmony of disorientations.

It is internet performers like Annie Abrahams who revolutionize the way art is – how art is portrayed across to its audiences and how art is perceived by its audience. Moving drastically from brick and mortar museums and art studios, art can also be observed just at the comfort of our homes, performed on the Third Space for its netizens.

Jon Cates’ IGAIES – How the Boundaries of Communication is Pushed

Jon Cates’ IGAIES (intimate glitches among internet errors) then further touches on how Internet Art can communicate through a performance our very society that touches our senses that challenges, pushes the boundaries of a performance art.

It first started out with a few performers showed on screen with filters over their faces, with their faces still visible to the online audiences.

XXXtraPrincess with filters on their faces.

I thought this has very successfully bring across the notion of our digital identities, our online personas, illustrated with the different filters. We can be who we want to be online. At the beginning of the performance, classical music was played at the background, as if signalling the very start of the performance and how we used the internet when it first start to bloom, creating the global village, a notion brought forth by McLuhan.

As the performance progresses, the imageries became more mysterious and left the online audiences wanting to know more. This is especially so when the online audiences can see a jar of leeches on the table, yet not know what is going to happen.

Leeches seen on the table

This is an example of a part where the online audiences are left more unsure than the physical audiences at Chicago itself.

Leeches seen on Roberto Sifuentes

What really shocked us was when the leeches are placed on Roberto Sifuentes, a near-death experience.

Leeches can be seen as good and bad. Good in the way that it can cleanse the body by sucking out the toxic in the blood and bad in the way that it gains out of the the body it hangs onto. Perhaps, it is both. The same way how the internet has impacted the world. How it sucks the living out of us, that we live for the “gram”, or “do it for the gram” which shows how netizens are living for the things they put on their social media. And on the other hand, the saving grace, or the realization of our overdosage of it. “Everyone dies cause of technology”, perhaps its a question of when.

It is fascinating how IGAIES brought to light the dark side of media. Of which, the venue of the performance, Chicago, had a huge role to play, “the birthplace of dirty dark media”. Dark Media, a term coined by Eugene Thacker describes a side of media that “have, as their aim, the mediation of that which is unavailable or inaccessible to the senses, and thus that which we are normally “in the dark” about”. Breaking its boundaries of what is deemed as acceptable and what is not, triggering the human sensory, our sight and hearing. It is of no doubt how art has continued to bring to light the situation of the society.

Communication, Taking an Unconventional Route

Another remarkable way that communication has moved away from its conventional method is a piece called Me and My Shadow highlighted by MariaX.

Me and My Shadow

The idea of shadow communication stood out to me. Instead of merely using words and/or the webcam to speak as a form of communication, body language is in the limelight for this installation by Joseph Hyde.

The life-size projection used the shadows of the participants to communicate and bring people together namely in London, Paris, Istanbul and Brussels. People were able to communicate in real time by their shadows. These people although located in different geographical locations, they are brought together in a virtual space, the Third Space.

Immersive and shows how technology can push the boundaries of communication is indeed the highlight of this piece. And how the other parties view you on the other hand voice down to how do you perceive yourself and how do you plan to portray yourself through the shadows. An interesting approach in communicating, letting go of the words and languages, but solely by our bodies.

Evolution of Media, Traditional to New Media

Moving away from traditional media, new media has changed interaction from a main source to its audiences to a peer-to-peer interaction system where audiences gets a say in affecting the transmission of information rather than a more top-down approach. The chat system throughout the symposium itself is an apt example of how the audiences get to interact with one another without directly interfering with the Internet performance itself. This further proves McLuhan’s idea where “the medium is the message”. The way the performance impacts its audiences is dependent on the medium in which it is used to convey the performance to its audiences. Take day 3 Jon Cates’ IGAIES for example. There were two types of audiences. One the physical audiences who got to view the the performance in real life and the online audiences who viewed IGAIES through Adobe Connect.

The chat box where online audiences get to interact with one another, discussing about the symposium without interrupting the speaker.

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” – Nicolas Tesla

Migrating as a village from physical to the virtual world, this village has accepted more people, more diversity than the old one – the global village. As we advance as a community, I wonder how Internet Art will continue to evolve in the future. This is merely a preface, my fellow netizens.

Additional Readings and References

Latency

Expanded Cinema

Marshall McLuhan Predicts The Global Village

Online En-semble: Entanglement Training, Annie Abrahams

The Third Space Network: Art of the Networked Practice – Program

Urban Dictionary – Do it For the Gram

Me and My Shadow – Joseph Hyde

The Language of New Media

Discovering Anger as a State of Mind Through Social Broadcasting with Annie Abraham’s Angry Women

Anger as a State of Mind

Anger, an expression, an emotion, a state of mind, the heat the rises from your gut, that irritates and exemplifies when another one adds an irrelevant comment. The frowns, the screams that are associated with the deep emotion is the expression of anger. Perhaps a slow-boiling ball of fire slowly eating you up on the inside. Annie Abraham’s Angry Women has demonstrated through the Third Space, the emotions and expressions associated to the feeling of anger.

About Annie Abraham’s Angry Women

Annie Abraham’s Angry Women consists of 5 webcam videos of women expressing their feeling of anger. Each video is unique in its own ways. Take 1 & 2 is a mixture of female and male, take 3 & 4 is one where there were 24 women of different nationalities of which they get to express their anger in their mother tongues with a limit of 12 minutes, and for Take 1 & 2 the 12 women were to express their anger in an unlimited amount of time, and stops until there was no anger left in the women. In Take 5, the 9 women were able to act, getting as close to their anger as possible.

On the Third Space vs In Real Physical Life

…to be present in this universe of alone togetherness. -Annie Abraham

A remark she made on Take 3 & 4, the women who expressed their anger were without any accompaniment in in their physical space, but with accompaniment on the Third Space. The women were alone, but when they meet on webcam, the Third Space, with a click of a mouse and connectivity, they instantaneously became together. Very much similar to websites like Omegle, the platform connected these people who did not know each other beforehand to meet on the platform for the performance. I reckon it would have been much tougher if the women were to be called to express their anger in real physical life.

Having not met each other beforehand, being task to express your anger (an emotion that exposes vulnerability) to a group of people you have not met before is tough. I think there might be two responds; some women might be more reserved while some might be able to openly unleash their anger. This might be because the other women on the other end of the screen do not know who they really are. Expressing their anger through social broadcasting, they are offered a assumption of acceptance as the women are still on the line on the webcam, each taking turns to express their anger. Perhaps the stark difference shown in the way people express their anger through the webcam and in real life is that the “bad feelings become less toxic when released” on the Third Space as written in Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. “Each takes as its premise the notion that you can deal with feelings without dealing directly with a person” that might be related to the emotions that you are feeling. Using another medium to express the anger rather than facing it head-on can be another method of anger expression today. Or perhaps people are just more irritable in this century that anger management have to be tweaked.

Anger to Women

The subject used for the online performance stood out to me. The emphasis on women rather than men.It was researched that women and men feel anger in different ways. Women often describe their anger using words like “hurt”, but not men. Also, women’s anger after often a build-up of events. In fact, men and women lack the control over their anger as compared to the other emotional state like anxiety and fear.

Looking at Annie Abraham’s Angry/ Colère, similar to the Please Change Beliefs by Jenny Holzer, she was able to receive responses from the public about anything regarding the topic of anger. It was interesting reading the responses on the site, the rage within people. One stood out to me.

Anger is eating me, from the inside, all my life, because of loneliness and lack of attention because it is still stupid in some ways, anger is a form of stupidity and this is a limitation in consciousness. Expand our consciousness in realizing that we are all connected to anger dissolve in ourselves and in the world. Experiencing this is the highest form of art for me. Anger is studidity, and i think we are not here to be stupid. – Anonymous

Being aware of the state of anger is a limitation to the responder who felt that it is merely something in you that is eating you up slowly inside. Knowing anger is not healthy or good for you. Angry Women allowed for the anger that women are experiencing to be shared and released through the Third Space via a webcam. The solution to the awareness of anger could be to vent it all out, touching on the state of mind of being angry rather than the situation that caused their anger.

Anger as a Universal Language

But for me it was quite hard now to watch the take in French in which I almost couldn´t understand anything. So, I realised, that for me (from a spectator´s view) the content of what we are saying is not irrelevant and that understanding some bits and fragments of our talking is important.. -Martina Ruhsam

The frowns, the screams, the fists, even though they were tasked to express their anger in their mother tongues, the frustration can be felt nonetheless. There might be a language barrier, yet the anger expressed is a universal language to all. With the instilled visual literacy in all of us, we could interpret the actions of the women to associate them with anger expressed.

At the end of their expression of anger, I am taken aback by how the women were liberated with joy and how they responded by woo-ing and having smiles on their faces. Perhaps the real solution to it is to directly approach the state of mind, rather than the situation itself, being angry.

Conclusions

I am not a performer, I use performance to do research.
I am not a researcher, I use research in my performance pieces.
I am a performer who uses research as a medium.
I am a performer researching encounters. – Annie Abraham

Annie Abraham’s Angry Women has just opened our eyes to the human reaction to exposing our vulnerabilities through social broadcasting and the state of mind of being angry She successfully explored and “study human behaviour without interfering in it.” Looking it in a bigger picture, all the women in the videos had help one another in a certain way to “be there for them” to vent their anger.

..it’s the effort of a group of people solving a problem collectively. -Annie Abraham

Indeed.

Additional Readings and References:

Anger, the Mismanaged Emotion

Anger / Colère

Disentangling the Entanglements

Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration.

Visual Literacy in Teaching and Learning: A Literature Perspective

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Face to Facebook, Former Day Catfish

Face to Facebook,

Face to Facebook is an online installation piece put together by stealing 1 million Facebook profiles and compiling them all in a unofficial and custom-made dating page. Thereafter, many reacted to the dating website.

The creators of Face to Facebook collected profiles through a special custom software. They then studied and then customized a face recognition algorithm which is programmed to group the faces of the profiles to their supposed personality and traits, categorizing the profiles on the dating website.

On the surface, what the creators of Face to Facebook merely did was to compile the information found on the users’ Facebook profiles into another site. (which technically is not infringing on the privacy of the Facebook users, since the same information can be found on their Facebook profiles as well) However, compiling them on a dating page then changes the game. I am humoured by what the creators of Face to Facebook have done. They have made a point about the information we put online and has changed our perspectives of social media.

Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.

-Creators of Face to Facebook

No doubt, the information on the dating website itself are distorted information, especially when the ignorant Facebook users are not actively looking for love on Facebook.Yet what I found interesting about it is that they come from harmless intentions, trying to prove a point on the type of information Facebook users put online in the increasingly connected world.

The things that happen on Facebook are really pretty meaningless. Not that they can’t have meaning, but simply that they don’t. Or, at least, they don’t until we get our collective hands on them. – D.E. Wittkower

In all honesty, we would not be bothered by a stranger’s Facebook we stumbled upon unless they are or friends, or people we have mutual friends with. Echoing what D.E. Wittkower has said, information we put on our social media are just extra information about our lives, very much like TMI (To Much Information) in current day teenage slang. Why then do we actively keep up with our social media accounts today? Are we merely updating our lives or trying to prove ourselves to others?

Parallel with Current Day Context – terming it Catfishing

In more recent news, as we shift from Facebook to Instagram and Snapchat in today’s context, information found on social media are still being stolen and used on dating websites and applications like Tinder. Catfish, is a coined term for it.

Catfishing which means to lure (someone) into a relationship by adopting a fictional online persona. This often means stealing someone else information online and putting them on another website with certain augmented information.

On example is in October 2017 when Benjamin Kheng, a Singaporean singer from the band The Sam Williow, discovered that there is a Tinder account created for him in Australia that he did not know about. The account used his images, but used abbreviation of his real name. The hacker who created the account used it talk to many girls on Tinder, giving a false image of the user of the profile the girls were talking to.

This ties in well with Face to Facebook and what the creators did to the Facebook profiles they found. Although there was not an ill intention to the created account on the dating website, but it has cautioned us on the information we decide to put online.

He compares our individual lives to those of cheese mites seen bustling about through a microscope. They all seem terribly busy with lots of activity, but as soon as we take our eye away from the magnifying scope, we see what it all amounts to: not much to post a status update about. He says that it’s the same with our lives as well—“It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.” The microscope we have is this “I” that undergoes our experiences. It makes us focus in on our dinner in a way that we don’t focus on anyone else’s. It makes us care about our friends’ trivial status updates too. – D.E. Wittkower

In our world, social media has become such a huge part of our lives. We are all caught up with our phones, on social media. This has also resulted in FOMO (fear of missing out), an anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media. Are we too caught up in being in the hype and sometimes lost our ability to find joy within our lives?

Current day, it is difficult to find ourselves connected to the people close to use in distance. With technology, we would rather be connected with people far from us through social media. We should they put down our phones, quit updating our Instagram stories, and step out to smell the flowers, smile at our neighbours, creating friendship much closer to us.

Additional Readings:

Face tol Facebook

Face to Facebook – Hacking Monopolism Trilogy

Hacking Monopolism Trilogy

 

The Eternal Frame by Ant Farm: How “Based on a True Story” is Indeed Powerful

Ant Farm, an extraordinary collective

Ant Farm is a group of radical practitioners, whose forte is in architecture, graphic arts and environment design founded by two architects, Chip Lord and Doug Michels, in San Francisco in 1968. Although they had dissolved in 1978, their works still continue to impact, teach and continue to inspire many today. The group that once saw themselves as underground architects/ artists, hence their collective name as Ant Farm, to be part of the counterculture, goes beyond social norms and expectations.

We wanted to be an architecture group that was more like a rock band. We were telling Sharon [a friend] that we would be doing underground architecture, like underground newspapers and underground movies, and she said, ‘Oh, you mean like an Ant Farm?’ and that’s all it took. It was very Ant Farm. The founding of the name was indicative of how Ant Farm worked: the right idea comes, everybody acknowledges it is the right idea and instantly adopts it.

— Doug Michels

Described by Gene Youngblood as “an autonomous reality community”, Ant Farm was going against the current, “working against the generation of (their) parents”.

The group were well-known for their inflatable architecture designs, though some did not go pass the conceptual stage. The Dream Cloud, one of their established projects, aimed at “creating temporary environment at the beach” where they explored the boundaries that architecture can go beyond the “physical multi-media environment”, as Chip Lord said in an interview with Randall Packer.

“Dream Cloud” during “AstroDaze” Freeport Beach, Texas, 1969 | taken from: http://mondo-blogo.blogspot.sg/2010/12/ant-farm-sex-drugs-rock-roll-cars.html

The Eternal Frame, Reenactment of the Assassination, otherwise known as “based on a true story”

During the 1968, where the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy shocked the world, the Ant Farm was of no exception. The revolution in the air drive the group to expand beyond just fictional narrative moving images, but incorporated a remarkable event in history that impacted the US, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

The filming process involved the live performance and re-enactment of the actual happening of the assassination at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas seen in the famous Zapruder film.

“The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype….”

— Doug Hall, 1984

The Eternal Frame pushes the boundary of the tense topic of the assassination through the re-enactment. Many might have heard about the event on the news or through the word of mouth, but the making of The Eternal Frame puts into perspective and into people’s minds the “true” happenings of the actual assassination.

“As photographers recorded images of places, objects, and people unmediated (it was thought) by the artist’s style, scholars believed that they could write history, in Leopold von Ranke’s essential phrase, “as it really was”.

-Rowman & Littlefiled, 1998

The Eternal Frame might just have merged history and film-making, documenting history through the lens of a camera, impacting people emotionally with the scenes that might have taken place in the actual setting of the assassination at Dealey Plaza.

This historical moment is captured in a much different way, bringing to light the digital representation and interpretation in the case the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The gory scenes of the blood filled gun shot and the collapse of Robert F. Kennedy can be put into perspective, despite its accurracy.

Putting my shoes in a regular patron of moving images much like The Eternal Frame, the “based on a true story” label moves away from the fictional narratives in the market, breaking boundaries will change my perspective of the film. It hints at the actual happening of the event in the past, bringing more emotions and more impacts, instilling the eternal frames captured through the lens of the camera into our minds.

Additional Readings

Spatial Agency – Ant Farm

Head to “Ant Farm”for a creepy-crawly good time

The Eternal Frame

Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies

A Pitstop: DIWO & Experimental Interaction

Experimental Interaction – A Summary, awaiting a Sequel

DIWO, otherwise known as, Do It With Others, is a concept created by Marc Garrett, the founder of Furtherfield. A new perspective brought forward to encourage collaboration, this has shifted creative production from being top-down to being collaborated. In the first half of the semester, Experimental Interaction class has emphasized on the idea of Doing It With Others (DIWO), The Third Space, Collective Narrative and the idea of collaborative art. Moving from The Tele-stroll to glitching up images, every project has an essence of collaboration and or using The Third Space as a medium. Each project has opened up my perspective on the realm we can work with for artistic productions, living up to its name of being experimental and bringing engagement to an interactive manner.

Same Vision, Different Approach – A Breakthrough

The founding fathers of Open Source and Furtherfield both have the same vision – inculcating openness in the sharing and learning of knowledge, tapping on the idea of collaborating with relevant counterparts to produce a much greater good for the society. Each has a bold statement that pushes for the once conservative playing field of talented individuals. Founded between the 1950s to the 1960s, Open Source allowed the virtual sharing of content on the World Wide Web, stripping its monetary value. Opening the gate to progress and the advancement of the society through the sharing of knowledge, I would boldly say that their initiatives have played a huge part in shaping the world today. Take Steve Jobs’ Apple for instance, it is undoubtedly seen everywhere. (In fact I am using one right now.) Steve Jobs started Apple with open source components and then creating a closed source operating system called the Mac Os X then produced personal computers for home that revolutionized the usage of computers and thereafter our mobile phones and tablets. Dare I say, such radical moves advances the world, creating a different social culture altogether, a breakthrough.

Furtherfield, breaking the Conservative Culture

Taking a leap of faith to break the stereotypes of art culture in 1996, Furtherfield is  a pioneer that broke the conservative culture. The emergence of Furtherfield created a more competitive and varied art scene to the one that was once flooded with elite artists. Going beyond just the four walls of a gallery, Furtherfield also created a platform that can host greater audience and boost viewership for artists on their humble first start-up website hosted at Backspace. Transforming the interaction to a two-way one, Furtherfield is a platform that allowed for conversations between the artists and the audience, a different approach in the appreciation of art. Besides, the Netbehaviour email list has encouraged people of the same interests to be connected through opportunities for dialogues, bringing people together.

As a dynamic art organization that is very involved with grass-root and ecology projects, Furtherfield is like no other. Creating a platform for the arts, technology and an advocate for social change, this perfect hybrid is indeed an exemplary addition to the art scene.

Micro-projects, in-class projects & the Third Space

Exploring the Third Space through The Tele-stroll and social broadcasting, the first micro-project involved a live-stream broadcasting with synchronization with our partners. Using the split-screen nature of the live broadcasting, we met our partners at the Third Space and produced “telepathic” moves as a form of performance.

A screenshot from The Tele-stroll – Two screens, as if we are opening a single door

Moving a step ahead, The Telematic Embrace, an exercise we did in class emphasized on collaboration and corporation as a social practice.

A screenshot of The Telematic Embrace, an exercise did in class

DIWO at the Third Space can be clearly seen. Moving interaction to the Third Space, we unleashed the playfulness of the medium by making use of the nature of the split screens placed in neat rows. Creating different ways we can be playful with it, finger touching, to finding items of the same colour, this collaborative project creates a form of collaborative art.

A screenshot of the Collective Body on Flickr page

The Collaborative Body, a-photo-a-day project of our body parts pieced together is one that demonstrate a collective artwork. Different photos pieced together forms a collective body of oneself, as if the body is malleable enough to be placed in a random position, altering the conventional viewpoint of the body.

An image of a collective glitch done in class by our classmates for The Exquisite Glitch

The Exquisite Glitch is a compilation of the different modifications that was made to the image, passing it down from one classmate to another. The final product is like an outcome by a computer virus, glitched, unrecognizable, nothing like its original. This is also a collective artwork that requires the input of more than one person to fully create.

DIWO, a term that involves the contribution of a mass looks at a more unpredictable, more unscripted form of art production. With the involvement of a group, no one person can predict what the outcome will be since the final product is the summation of all individual efforts through a collaborative technique.

Aftermath

Dissecting the projects we have done thus far, it is of no doubt that the DIWO concept is one of the main focus. Using the Third Space as a medium and the Collective Narrative as the the main way of production, DIWO the underlying concept behind is brought forth. As the generation that will rise up, this overarching idea of DIWO will be one that will expand in greater in depth and in width. Standing on the shoulders of our giants, we hope for a brighter tomorrow.

 

Additional Readings:

Steve Jobs: an open source pioneer? You bet.

Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood

DIWO (DO-IT-WITH-OTHERS): ARTISTIC CO-CREATION AS A DECENTRALIZED METHOD OF PEER EMPOWERMENT IN TODAY’S MULTITUDE

Telegarden // A Change in Perspective

When we hear the word “gardening”, it usually involves physical soil space, a hand trowel, seeds, watering can. What the Telegarden team have created in 1995 has totally changed our perspective of gardening, replacing our hands with cursors and mouse clicks. Each action in the Telegarden, totally controllable at the comfort of your home, through a screen.

This web-interface allows netizens to control a robotic arm to manoeuvre around the soil area of the Telegarden through the lens of a camera attached onto the arms of the robots. Netizens are able to plant seeds, water the plants and observe the growth of the plants.

Below is a brief overview of the entire Telegarden project:-

The Ultimate Contrast

What the entire Telegarden experience gives its users is the stark contrast of speed using the internet and gardening. On the internet, it is almost immediate that your demand is made, merely with a click on the mouse. On retrospect, the act of planting a seed does not guarantee the sprouting of leaves and stem the next moment. It takes real, human time, days, and weeks, even months. You simply cannot rush gardening, not even when it is done online.

“Gardening” Attachment

It is beyond absurd to know that “gardeners” over the internet do get attached to their plants planted in the Telegarden especially when they might never get to see them in real life. As seen in the video attached above, some got a little over-protective when another “gardeners” started planting their seeds near their plants. I would have thought that “gardening” in the Telegarden was merely another form of play and side activity for the netizens.

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Voltaire

We must cultivate our garden.

Telegarden-ing fulfilled the paradox of online gardening created by two different activities – surfing the internet and gardening. One stagnant and idle, another that requires physical strength and patience, this experience is fresh. With the rise of internet users, Telegarden is a subtext for people to not neglect what we used to do without the internet. It is a Third Space for the social interaction of the “gardeners” who go online to check out on the plants at the Telegarden, while “gardening” together on an online platform.

“The Telegarden creates a physical garden as an environment to stage social interaction and community in virtual space. The Telegarden is a metaphor for the care and feeding of the delicate social ecology of the net.” — Randall Packer, San Jose Museum of Art, April 1998.

Almost like a mass gathering of green fingers from all across the world, Telegarden not just created a totally different experience of gardening, but also gave a different outlook on the internet. Like what Randall Packer said, “a metaphor for the care and feeding of the delicate social ecology of the net”.

Additional Readings

The Distant Gardener: What Conversations in the Telegarden Reveal About Human-Telerobotic Interaction

The Telegarden

The Third Space, a technological illusion of real life//Telematic Dreaming

The Third Space, a concept common people might find it hard to digest, but in fact, it has become an integral part of our everyday life in the technologically advanced 21st century. But has it messed up our minds? A technological illusion of real life?

The Third Space as defined by Randall Packer in his article on The Third Space is a space that “represents the fusion of physical (first space) and the remote (second space) into a third space that can be inhabited by remote users simultaneously or asynchronously”.

The Third Space, a virtual yet real realm we often come in and out of has no doubt become part of our everyday life. From a simple phone call to a short text message, the Third Space is activated in almost all parts of our lives. What is almost as startling is the fact that the distinct difference between the real and virtual world is almost blur and grey. The virtual world is part of our real world.

In this particular piece called Telematic dreaming by Paul Sermon, it explores deeper into the idea of the Third Space, stretching the potential experience we can gain from it. Telematic Dreaming is a live telematic video installation that uses a 2MB ISDN telephone line to link two locations. The bed has projected screen that enhances the entire telepresence.

The choice of site for Telematic Dreaming is intriguing for me. The bed is an intimate, private place, yet it is used for the interactive video installation. It is an interesting choice, to take advantage of the nature of the setting, a place to let your guard down to enhance the experience of the video installation. It brings the audience experiencing the entire experience closer and more intimate with the artist, even without physical contact.

This piece eliminates the subconscious existence of the Third Space bringing in reality into the virtual world. The addition to what technology can provide is the perceived haptic engagement. Telematic Dreaming incorporated the illusion of the sense of touch, a step closer to bringing the virtual world into the real world. I quote from the synopsis of Telematic Dreaming

“When the user reaches out with their hand they interact, not in the local space, but in the distant one, and when they cause an effect to another physical body in the distant location it is evidence that is where their consciousness resides.”

In this case, the consciousness of the user is in the Third Space where the projected screen on the bed enables the sight of the happenings of the other person in another location. The combined engagement of the two person concludes that their consciousness are located in the Third Space, a virtual world, in real time. Our fascinating and dare I say almost foolish brain connected everything seen on the projected screen to be perceived as real, as in in real life. Yet, the Third Space is the fundamental of human engagement these days with the ease of technology and the luxury of mobile phone devices. The Third Space, a virtual place we come in and out of, a place we interact with our loved ones, a place we communicate when all else fails.

Additional Input

A piece I thought is worth mentioning is an episode on Black Mirror called Be Right Back, that uses artificial intelligence to communicate to the deceased using information of them online to imitate their style of communication.

Below is a trailer of Be Right Back:-

This shows the potential of the Third Space interaction and how much it can impact us physically, emotionally and mentally. The episode goes about showing how Martha, the widow, goes about her life trying to accept the fact that her husband is dead by constantly communicating with “him” through phone calls and text messages. What stretches the limit was the possibility of a silicon made “human” of her husband to replace his physical being.

The virtual world has become such an important part of our life. It aids human communication and interaction. Technology has eased our form of communication, could it also mess up our minds?

Additional Readings

Telematic Dreaming – Synopsis

Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence

Telematic Dreaming, University of Brighton

Open Source promotes DIWO (Do It With Others)

Summary of the readings

Open Source is a platform where the community can access to shared information, utilizing the human capital to a greater extent. Stemming from the hacker culture, Open Source, liberated the otherwise restricting and inflexible means of creative production, promoting DIWO (Do It With Others).

Open Source allow for virtual sharing of content using the World Wide Web on cyberspace. This has largely shrunk the “distance” between artists and viewers of art. Responding against proprietary models, Open Source, has made creative productions a common good, available to the mass without monetary profits. In the case of Open Source softwares like Linux, the accessibility to the source code can allow for alterations by innovative programmers to execute a modified programme. As such, the concept of Open Source has turned the World Wide Web into a platform for synergistic interactions of the mass, updating or enhancing current information.

Before the liberty for synergistic interactions, restrictions were imposed, putting a price tag to the accessibility to datas. That led to a rise of hackers. Richard Stallman, a researcher of MIT AI Lab and the father of the idea of Open Source, pushed for the idealization of the concept. As a hacker, he provided free UNIX (operating system) under the GNU project as he thought the proprietary model was discouraged openness and the exchange of ideas. Linux and GNU are some prominent examples of liberal softwares with Open Source development in the 90s. A basic license called the General Public License (GPL) was implemented, allowing for modification and distribution of softwares. Owing to Stallman’s leadership in the Open Source field, the Open Source culture still continues today, benefitting billions.

A more detailed and concise history of Open Source can be found in the infographic below:-

taken from: http://www.mdgadvertising.com/blog/the-history-of-open-source-software-infographic/

The decline of traditional proprietary practices has allowed for a more collaborative art scene, highlighting Yochai Benkler’s idea of “peer production”. In fact, the essence of Open Source requires for collaboration and inputs from the masses, otherwise the concept is considered futile. The Open Source culture make ideas and information as readily accessible as possible, leading to more gain than loss to the community. Traditional proprietary practices is a more isolated and individualized way of creative production, more contained within an atelier. Per contra, Open Source creates a mean for sharing and collaborating without a gatekeeper. Aforementioned in the first paragraph, Open Source creates virtual interactions for inputs. This creates a constantly advancing and conclusive community of sharers, creators, learners and teachers, promoting DIWO.

To end off, below is a video about the origin of Open Source and interesting facts about it:-

What is Open Source? // your phone probably runs it! (WITH LEGO) by Danielle Thé

Additional Inputs

Technological advancement plays a key role in allowing Open Source to strive. It is with the access to computers and the World Wide Web, does it allow the mass to contribute and receive inputs. Technological advancement globalized the world, shrinking “space” and “time”. Please Change Beliefs by Jenny Holzer discussed in class is an apt example. With the “third space” available, people from different countries are able to gain access to the site, crippling the physical distance. Also, since it is available 24 hours, assuming to infinite time, the site technically compiles inputs from the people of the past, present and the future. Essentially breaking the barriers of actual space and time, Open Source is a marvellous tool that continues to exponentially advance us as a community with DIWO.

In fact, in ADM itself this practice is prevalent, with our very own Open Source Studio (OSS). The community based sharing and collaborative site allows for the display of creative productions online (yet not restricting the nature of the art work, tradition or digital mediums).

taken from: https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/

Peer-to-peer interactions can be seen with the comment section open for insightful feedbacks or comments. Ergo, such platforms continues to inspire the newer generation of creators.

Additional Readings

Collaboration with Lean Media: How Open-Source Software Succeeds

Open Source Software and the “Private Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science