art review

There are 5 posts tagged art review (this is page 1 of 1).

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