Strangers Art: Play Draw Point

Group Members:
Daphne Ngatimin, Elizabeth Quek, Francesca Nio, Yeoh Zhen Qi

Inspired by the works of Blast Theory, a UK-based performance group that creates interactive performances that engage the public community in site-specific locations, we were assigned to recreate similar collaborative performances using Singapore as our stage. We will be using the social media, Instagram as a secondary platform, with the public as participants and viewers. The performance that we create aims to stretch art into life, breaking the boundaries between the artist and the audiences while incorporating the concept of #DIWO (collaborative art). 

Introducing our on-location performance project, “Play Draw Point,” which will devise a narrative that plays off interactions with strangers and the media. The players will be the artist of the game by collaboratively drawing a portrait and then associate the drawing to a “look-a-like”. The incentive that these players get is that they will become part of the performance as co-artists, creating a collaborative art piece, hence creating a sense of shared experience and community.

HOW ITS PLAYED?

  1. From a list of facial features we curated, the player would have to pick out one feature to draw from the box.
  2. Up to the player’s interpretation, he/she would have to draw out the feature which was chosen – starting from the face shape.
  3. The drawing would then be passed to the next player (another stranger) until the drawing is completed.
  4. After each drawer’s turn, they would have to take a picture with the drawing and point towards a specified direction such that the pictures would link up on our secondary platform, Instagram. If we are rejected in participation, we will upload a blank black space representing the glitch in our project- breaking the narrative.
  5. At the end of each portrait, another player would  be required to guess the identity of the drawing based on their own interpretation, regardless if it a celebrity, cartoon character or even someone they know.

The drawing/list of features written down does not lead to a specific identity, as such the interpretation of the drawing is fully dependant on the player to create an interesting association with one. This shows how the brain is malleable, in a way it associates objects/people with certain links. Another interesting point is that the players become part of the art work and the artists to curate the drawing. Each of them have different drawing skills and interpretation which allows the drawing to be ‘glitched’ and morphed into an individuals interpretation – whether it becomes a cartoon drawing or a portrait, or even an unguessable form!

Test Run (ADM)
In order to ensure there are no failures or actual bumps of the project on the actual day, we decided to have a short trial in ADM – without telling them anything, which leaves them to their own interpretation as well.

PROJECT PLAY DRAW POINT:

On the day of the actual experimental project, we went off around NTU, looking for players to become co-artists. At the end, we obtained 6 complete drawings, involving approximately 60 players in total!

In order to document and to show the small add ons of each drawing, the players along with their drawing are uploaded to our Instagram. Moreover, to give the players an idea of the game, our Instagram page was also given to them in order for them to understand the whole game and narrative of the project.

https://www.instagram.com/letsplaystrangerthings/

TO Conclude, the way we curated our project was giving the control to the players, being co-artists and creators of the game itself. It is up to them to glitch it up and down. One thing that I caught my attention was that the phenomenon of a linkage of glitch. For example, when someone rejected us, there will be a higher rate of upcoming rejection (glitch). In a way our project has been influenced by a lot of telematic art that uses collaborative art and leaving the outcome to the players – such as Yoko Ono’s cut piece, Douglas Davis’s World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence, Ken Goldberg’s Telegarden or even the exquisite glitch micro project. Our final project has explored the idea of the social practice in including the audiences into the piece, making it an interactive experience that included both ourselves and the audiences, as co-artists! Creating a community of artists that anyone can be a part of!

On Location Performance: Strangers Art – Play, Draw & Point

fiInspired by the works of Blast Theory, a UK-based performance group that creates interactive performances that engage the public community in site-specific locations, we were assigned to re-create similar collaborative performances using Singapore as our stage. We will be using the social media, Instagram as a secondary platform. The performance that we create aims to stretch art into life, breaking the boundaries between the artist and the audiences. Introducing our on-location performance project, “Let’s Play Stranger’s Art,” which will devise a narrative that plays off interactions with strangers and the media. The players will be the artist of the game by collaboratively drawing a portrait. #DIWO

Our game plan will be to first approach a random stranger around the chosen location to help us draw a facial feature starting from the face shape. This will connect to the next stranger to draw another type of feature chosen and so on, building a chain of artists drawing a face. The facial features will be chosen in random by the player from a mystery box filled with different types of  facial features. Once the face is completed, another stranger will be asked to guess who the drawing portraying. The stranger can guess any identity without restrictions (any cartoon, celebrities or influencers). We will be filming the process, as well as documenting it on the performance’s Instagram to see the evolution of the portrait. Of course, there will be rejections from the crowd along the way; this adds to the unexpected mess and glitch towards our performance. We will represent this glitch by posting a black blank post on Instagram. Towards the end of the performance, we will have a collage of the process, the final portrait drawing, the ‘look-alike’, and black glitches along the way.

The incentive that these players get is that they will become part of the performance as co-artists, creating a collaborative art piece, hence creating a sense of shared experience and community. Our performance will create a connection between the players found in the location, building a bridge between them, us and the performance. The performance will be carried out around Nanyang Technological University (NTU), a space that is vibrant and spontaneous. The safety and privacy of these participants will be taken seriously since we understand that some of them would not be comfortable taking part in this performance. Overall, we simply want to create a performance that is fun yet thought-provoking. More importantly, we want to apply what we have learnt in Experimental Interaction into it!

Communication Revolution

Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution

Gene Youngblood is a media, arts and politics theorist that holds the belief that media itself needs to be democratic. The publication of his book, Expanded Cinema, in 1970 led to the impact of communication technologies on the democratic process and the capacity to participate. Youngblood announced the need for a “communication revolution” in which the media must be liberated; a site for the freedom to express and perform. He suggested that in order for the democracy to flourish in the 21st century, individuals must claim the “power to define the context that establishes the reality in which we want to live.”

This reminded me of the report on “Digital Identity,” where Elahi performed Tracking Transcience 2.0. He brings a point where we have become a global society of surveillance. Giving excess information to everyone and sharing everything which devalues private information. This links to the study of social broadcasting as we can see how far the internet has evolved. The way society has manipulated and used it to their own benefits and rights. Despite the increase of freedom the public has, it will still be forever monitored by someone even though it is more decentralised. This ties in to the exploration of social broadcasting as an unfinished communication revolution through the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium. It unites local and global speakers and audiences into the third space through adobe connect. This brings an active international telematic arts community that rises above the geographical distances to Singapore. The symposium highlights how networked space can be used as a platform for live performances and online artistic works; stimulating dialogue, and encourages an online global open discussion through the chat room.

On the first day of the symposium (29th May), it highlighted the idea of being connected in telematic space by embracing the new internet work based on online social play. Maria Chatzichristodoulou (also known as MariaX) presented on “The Promise of Internationalism”. During Chatzichristodoulou’s keynote, she mentioned the ideation of FLUX. Flux is defined as a movement of continuous changes, constantly changing. She referred this idea back to the actions and happenings in the culture of art, specifically telematic art. She talked about how internationalism has grown over the past years into a global democratic culture to demonstrate how artist from different location can meet and perform together via the internet, creating digital collaborative art.

Chatzichristodoulou first referenced Galloway and Rabinowitz artworks and how they overcame the use of technology to create collaborative art in real time and virtual communication. Their first aim was to identify new genres and hybrid practises. This led to the creation of Hole in Space (1980) to exhibit bandwidth communication showing rich emotions through the third space. It showed the beauty of people coming together in another space. Another important artist that embraces telematic arts as mentioned is Paul Sermon. His art piece Telematic dreaming was a set up environment of two bed, one in different location. The bed becomes a place of encounters and the ability to access the users space anytime through the ‘sense of touch’ in the context of the bed and screen via telematic space. Furthermore, she talked about Annie Abraham and how her art pieces are filled with tentativeness and interconnectivity — embracing the messy and malleable. Abrahams embraces the liveness, miscommunication and network failure. She highlights the idea of the engagement in complexities and poignancies in everyday life as a fundamental to break down and blur the line between performer and viewer.

Chatzichristodoulou ended her keynote by talking about Rabih Mroue. He pointed out how media has manipulated a particular image of reality. Mroué brings forth the idea where the use of digital technology is so manipulated that reality is somehow depicted in cinematic ways: staged and seen through lenses or screens. In The Pixelated Revolution (2012), the viewers can compare the videos of Syrian protesters with the avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogme 95 manifesto. He compares frames and footages from mobile phones of protestors in Syria and the government. It shows the contrast of a raw and shaky film to a clear and framed footage by the government. In the film, the protestor is documenting his own death, which brings the idea of someone using technology to broadcast towards the community to make judgements and writing history.

“Digital material is full of surprises. Sometimes it is broken and you see only half of it, in other cases, it freezes or it simply disappears. It is something virtual that you cannot grasp. It is fragile, rootless and lies somewhere in the cables.”

This reflected how the digital world can be so manipulated that there is a blur line of what is real and what is not. In relation to social broadcasting, who knows if what is shown is curated and framed. Who is to tell what is real and what is fake? How do we know if information being fed to us now is also real?

After Chatzichristodoulou’s keynote, Annie Abraham performed an online ensemble, Entanglement in  training (2018), along with her collaborators Antye Greie, Helen Varley Jamieson, Soyung Lee, Hương Ngô, Daniel Pinheiro, and Igor Stromajer. This piece displayed Annie Abraham’s approach in creating a space where her co-performers can discuss ideas together to achieve a performance contributed by others and not just one where it is carefully curated. Abraham mentioned that the entanglement between machines and how people can make things happen.

“It has to be something new. A real training with something unknown — creating a performance with new artists that you have no control upon and try to harmonise. This is how we embrace the mess.”

 

Day 2 (30th May) of the symposium, Matt Adams presented on Blast Theory, which is one of the most controversial works from the late 1990. It consists of a group of artists based in Brighton, UK led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj – collaborating with the mixed reality lab at the University of Nottingham. Matt Adams talked about different art statements from Kidnap, Uncle Roy All Around You, I’d Hide You, My Neck of the Woods and many others. It all transforms real life into a burst of virtual realm, ‘contaminating’ it with its unexpected, messy and often paradoxical essence.

https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/kidnap/

Kidnap, portrays a fictional world of myth by story making and interconnectedness. Spectators paid £10 to enter a lottery to experience the stimuli of being kidnapped. 10 people were chosen at random. It reflected a classic exposé on the participatory act of losing the power of control, simultaneously, being in control. Another example is Uncle Roy All Around You, where online and street players collaborate to find ‘Uncle Roy’ before being invited to make a commitment to a stranger. Web users help search for Uncle Roy through a digital map of the area and sends messages to the street players to help find Uncle Roy. The street players were set out to find Uncle Roy with a small tablet given under 60 min to find him. Near the end of the game, players were asked if they would help a stranger in crisis and help comfort them? This connects the street players and online players together to the people who answered yes. However, questions were raised as to what extent should they treat it seriously or if it was just for the game. The whole point of Blast Theory was to find the idea of connecting people across the internet, shortening the distance which can create a type of revolution. However there is a danger through the idea of utopian where everything is possible can become nothing is possible as discussed.

To conclude, the techniques and technologies of social broadcasting today are universal and constantly developing. By looking back at the history of media artists and activists, we have unfolded and exposed the use of network and social media into a collaborative platform for creative invention and social broadcasting. Social broadcasting has revolutionised the way society communicates, where the control of media and narrative has shaped our lives in taking the control of manipulating our identity to an identity that we now embrace through the norm. We have evolved from a centralised individual streaming to a collaborative telematic performance through global peer-to-peer interaction from both artists and audience. We have created something new and unexpected whilst embracing the mess. What intrigued me the most out of this whole experience was the interactivity and volume the participants hold in the chatroom. The discussion that took place can go so much in depth yet wide in terms of topics being discussed. This shows the true meaning of being interconnected in the third space with strangers by sharing our own thoughts and perspective; stretching the idea far beyond the expected that could go on and on. An unfinished communication revolution.

 

References:
http://www.artpractical.com/feature/profile_gene_youngblood/
https://thirdspacenetwork.com/gene-youngblood/
https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/disentangling-the-entanglements/
https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/participatory-act-giving-up-control/
https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/social-broadcasting-an-unfinished-communications-revolution/
https://thetheatretimes.com/conversation-with-rabih-mroue-about-his-lecture-performance-the-pixelated-revolution/
http://www.bodydataspace.net/what-we-do/
http://www.bodydataspace.net/projects/meandmyshadow/

Everyone’s got a Dark Side.

Annie Abrahams was born in the Netherlands and has been based in France since 1985. She holds a PhD in Biology from the University of Utrecht and is a graduate in fine arts from the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, Arnhem. Annie Abrahams’s work reflects on the idea of networking technologies as well as installations and performances in physical space. She engages on  the disentanglements in the entanglements in order to understand the nature of the third space as we progressively bury ourselves in.

In the article Trapped to Reveal, Annie Abrahams mentioned how in Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together describes how as technology further evolves, we progressively hide behind technology more and more. The intimacy in communications become something we rather avoid than to look for. A perfect example of this would be the use of smartphones and the internet. It helps us flee from our fear of the other. However, it is suggested that social media such as Facebook teaches us how to simulate intimacy, to make relations easy and clean. Despite this, it contrasts to the last article we were assigned about false identity and what may seem real may be not necessarily the truth. Brad Troemel argues in the same lines of how

“The process of image management on Facebook is already less an outpouring of expression than it is an exercise in omission of information about one’s self”. 

With this said, the relations made in the third space can become something superficial and everything we know may be nothing.

Annie Abrahams questions the state of happiness and how can we allow our true and honest self exist without masking. She expresses how we humans

“need to make space for the beast in the beauty, to go back to reality, to claim the human.”

This inspired her to create the project of ‘Angry Women’. Project Angry Women is a live performance broadcast carried out in 2012. It looks over the expression and behaviour of ‘Angry Women’ as well as time and space. 12 minutes long, 9 women are set in front of their webcams, connected via a common interface where they expressed their anger and irritations. This emotion-filled, melodramatic project was also conducted on females across the globe, breaking cultural barriers. Women participated expressed themselves through screams, cries and delusional laughter. It was latterly carried out with mixed genders. This project aimed to study the human behaviour, where we are the most vulnerable to reveal a side that we do not usually show. It reflects how we show less of our vulnerable yet true side, masking behind technology and putting the fake out there. Social media platforms became such a norm in this generation that it curate us to create a digital identity that portrays a ‘perfect’ life. We forget the human in us: the anger, the sadness, the fear; and display the positive traits to others where we are thought to be easily accepted. Thus, we shield away the negative traits and forge a fake digital identity. In contrast, Annie Abrahams embraces the negativity and the loss of human traits in us, exposing the inner frustration and anger of women.

http://www.bram.org/angry/women/

Furthermore, Angry Women captures the concept of DIWO. The project could not be carried out alone nor without a team of participants from different backgrounds. Discussions and ideas on anger were exchanged in the perception of each individual and how it can influence the dynamics of others. This gives the audience and the artist herself a valuable study on human behaviour.

During the interview between Furtherfields and Annie Abrahams, Annie Abrahams mentions that her main aesthetic component would be human behaviour, hence calling her artworks “behavioural art”. She compares what she does now to what she did during her Biology studies. In both cases, she observes behaviour in constrained situations.

“The monkeys, that were the study objects became” humans and the cage the Internet.”

What struck me upon reading the interview was that, Annie Abrahams stated that when one participates in her performances means taking a risk.

“Nothing is rehearsed, means accepting, you can’t control everything. It means committing to continue even if all seems to go wrong, to be attentive to the others around you with whom you share the performance space, with whom you are co-responsible for the shared moment in time.”

This suggests that we should try to open up spaces and discussions with people who have other opinions other than yours, to go beyond safety-zones, to find ways to communicate with and about hatred, angst and love. Going against the norm of portraying our carefully curated digital identity and showing our true selves. Global telecommunications have challenged and penetrated all previous notions of the divide between public and private space, shaping a world that may be no longer ‘human’. However, after reading and absorbing all this information, are we really going to change for the better and stop curating our digital identity. Is the fear of being shamed to great due to the overly judgemental world we live in? Are we fearful of each other? Thus, acting the way in which we perceive we want to be but hiding the anger and frustration deep within us. Everyone’s got a side that we don’t show, even I do. 

 

References:
https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/disentangling-the-entanglements/
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/18236/18237
http://digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/annie-abrahams-allergic-to-utopias/
https://www.furtherfield.org/addictive-behaviours-interview-artist-annie-abrahams/

Video Selfie – A Weird Side of Me

For my video selfie, I decided to go a bit ‘old-school’ and to play around with one of the effect photobooth offers on the mac (childhood things of my generation). I decided to do something my best friend and I usually do when we are lounging at home, as we play a song, somewhat dance and sing along with extra props (which I do not have during this raw take). I was recording this in front of my friends in a classroom, in the hive when I just remembered I had to record a video selfie and upload it. This video shows my inner weird side that my friends usually see, hence, I was comfortable recording this in front of them. Moreover, I like to jam to songs as I act along the lyrics with a little vanity in front of the camera. I guess I am camera-shy at first but as I get use to it, I get comfortable? in a way of showing my true goofy self in reality. Im just a kid having fun!

My Desktop Shot

I like my desktop clean, organised and categorised as it helps me find my things in a simpler way – with folders and icons. I also like having different desktop backgrounds that resonates or inspire me as I use my laptop. Such as “No Bad Vibes.”I have 5 desktop screens where I can do different work and things on different desktop in one laptop, with different background. Personalising each one. I guess it reflects me in a way where I like things to be neat and organised, where each thing is for something, like my room and as a person- capricorn things. As well as sending positive vibes to the people around me and influence myself to be the better.

#staypositiveandbright


Everything Is Not What It Seems.

Wittkower’s article, “A Reply to Facebook Critics,  has made me reflect upon the living digital era and how users of Facebook has moulded their own individual digital identity. Facebook, an online social platform was created to allow the society to reach out, connect with others and voice our own opinions and views across the globe. However, we have turned it into something more, something real yet superficial in our lives. It acts as a mirror, reflecting our social behaviour and existence, revealing our likes and dislikes in the community. Moreover, the article brings out an important statement where being friends online has no meaning, as it may be that you are not friends in real life. I am sure all of us have those online friends where not necessarily we know each other in real life. This reflects the curiosity built within human beings, where we are all curious about each other. Surveilling ourselves, as well as each other. The lives we display in the digital world and online friends. Our lives are just like empty pages, everyday we are creating and documenting to fill up the book.

Another interesting point that Wittkower brought up was that one thing could mean thousands of different things or it could mean nothing to someone. Each of us see value in a variety of aspects. Who is what to say what is right and what is wrong. The norm in society just sets a standard where society could follow and share similarities with others in order to connect and feel ‘belongness’. Following on the psychology principle of socio-cultural, all human beings are social animals and has a need to belong. It may not necessarily apply to you as you could think otherwise. Living in a harsh and judgemental society whom may not be brave enough to voice out, this could lead to a creation of identity that may not be even true. Everything that is out there is not what it may seem. Just like Facebook, we post what we want to post to let others see and hide the things we do not want to show. We shape our profile in a certain way to be accepted in society. Or is it that the Facebook generation has shaped the way we are, what we want to share or hide, what we want our lives to look like in a profile page. Have we lost our true selves while creating a digital identity in a reflection of who we want to be but not necessarily who we are.

“The indeterminacy allows us users plenty of space to make things mean what we want them to. If there’s anything humans are good at, it’s creating meaning through social interactions.”

In 2002, Bangladeshi-born American Elahi was mistakenly associated with terrorist activities. He was returning from one of his frequent trips abroad when he was detained in the airport. The FBI opened an investigation on him, which they pursued for the next six months. Instead of panicking or resisting, he decided to collaborate by starting Tracking Transience, what he calls “a project in self-surveillance.” He documents the locations and minute details of his day-to-day activities, then makes them available to the public and the FBI on his website and in his art. Not only is Elahi giving visual and textual information but there is an independent third party, his bank, which verifies his location and time where these point cross-reference through his purchases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/giving-the-fbi-what-it-wants.html

In the interview between Hasan Elahi and Randall Packer, he states that what he post may not be what it seems.

“As artists, we try to create experiences. The end result of Tracking Transience is the experience of going through the information and realising the reversal that’s taken place. By telling you everything, I’m really telling you nothing. I actually live a private and anonymous life and that you know very little about me. Telling you one part of my story.”

This says everything; how we choose the side we want to show that may tell you nothing but just the surface. Elahi also questions that is the project still considered art if everyone, the billion people out there did it. He views art as a creative problem solving between the digital world and society. Tracking Transience 2.0,  was to make a point, a conceptual work where the motivation sets it apart. He did not feel exposed as he was just like a spy agency spying on himself, and through this, watching became apart of entertainment. He also commented that artists has a responsibility of being a chronicler of what is happening immediately around their society.

After watching a TED talk by Hasan Elahi, Hasan Elahi vs. the FBI: The Art of Self-Surveillance, Elahi mentions that uploading and posting is not a big deal, it is something we all do in our daily lives, creating our own archives. To give someone information directly, it gives a different identity.

Through this project, Elahi brings a point where we have become a global society of surveillance and he has tapped into this phenomenon by giving up his data willingly and profusely on a daily basis by merging art and his daily life. Giving excess information to everyone and sharing everything which devalues private information. However, he is also able to access the logs of who is viewing him on his website. So who is watching who? As Elahi mentioned, has watching unconsciously become apart of entertainment in our lives? Is that why we ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ each other on social platforms, even though we might not know or have met each other in real life? Do we unconsciously compare and shape ourselves to fit within the digital norm in the need of belongness? Creating a digital identity that might not be what it reflects.

References:
Interview between Hasan Elahi and Randall Packer.
I share everything. Or do I?
https://www.ted.com/talks/hasan_elahi (TEDTalk: Hasan Elahi vs. the FBI: The Art of Self-Surveillance)
Wittkower, D. E. (2010). “Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on your Mind? A Reply to Facebook Critics,” Popular Culture & Philosophy

Art as a Social Commentary

Ant Farm Artists: Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schrier, Uncle Buddie

Based as an architecture and design group by Doug Michels and Chip Lord, in 1968, it looks into the conceptual activity of the late 60s/70s. It breaks through the walls of traditional architecture into the new media. Ant Farm involves themselves in the youth’s culture embrace of communal living, liberation and utopian ideals, breaking free from the ethos of DIY. The group combined architecture, performance, recent news, sculpture, installation, and technology, to document its activities on camera in the early days of video art; embracing the latest technologies to comment on American culture and mass media.

“Ant Farm worked against a backdrop of tremendous cultural ferment, especially in San Francisco ….. was followed by passionate antiwar demonstrations.”

https://loop-barcelona.com/activity/video-rewind-ant-farm/

One of the public installation performance Ant Farm did was “Media Burn”, also known as the “ultimate media event.” In this piece, two “dummies” dressed as astronauts ‘drove’ the Phantom dream car at maximum speed into a wall of flaming television sets. It acted as a parodic media critique through the use of two cultural icons: the automobile and television. Ant Farm addressed the omnipresence of television in everyday life. The video is directed after the news coverage of a space launch, including an inspirational speech by a John F Kennedy impersonator, since it was performed on the 4th of July. “Media Burn” became a visual manifesto of an emblem against the political and cultural law.

In reference to Randall Packer’s interview with Chip Lord, Lord mentioned the details in the performance of “Media Burn” had different components that made it more real. Such as, logos and souvenir booklets designed for this piece, turning something fiction to non-fiction. This inspires young artists to look beyond what we can grasp and explore other fields. Inspired by the socio-cultural  happenings, Ant Farm produced and bend art works into social commentary, together. This shows the value of DIWO and what it could create and achieve compared to a DIY project.

DIWO

In the 90s, the dominance of Britarts in the 90s led a small number of high profile artists to degrade, shrinking platforms and the representation of their work. UK art culture were hijacked by the marketing strategies of Saatchi and Saatchi of the advertising world. This motivated Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow to create a platform where the community were able to share enthusiasm for particular artworks towards the global public – an experimentation and collaboration for the community arts, street art, pirate radio and activism.

It was first established at Backspace an informal production space. It encouraged the idea of sharing ideas and technical resources in both physical and across the globe via the web. This space also acted as a place to advocate DIY consciousness and encouraging users to get their hands dirty with technology and the new culture. It aimed to cultivate the community to interact and experiment with each other. This enabled participants to retrieve and manipulate pieces that have been uploaded to the platform

“Furtherfield provides an informal creative space that supported learning and fruitfully connected established practitioners with newbies acting as a “container, connector, and root node for artists and performers wishing to virtually get together and ‘jam online’.”

 

Furtherfield, a not-for-profit company, connects the global community into innovating new possibilities, critical thinking and exploring out-of-the-box ideas, with the hand of technology. It also examines and questions today’s important topics through art. They strive for new ways for artists, academics and technologists to work hand in hand, sharing possibilities in the field of artistic, social and economic. It challenges debates and enhances open engagement with people advocating the process of ‘Doing It With Others’ (DIWO).

“DIWO means exploring the potential share visions, resources and agency, through collaboration and negotiation across physical and virtual networks maintaining a critical consciousness…”

 

Nonetheless, Marc Garrett mentioned that having individualism is crucial, it allows us to differentiate ourselves. However, we as a community too, need to know how to collaborate as it could create something extraordinarily rich in culture and ideas. DIWO culture takes individualism and combines it with others in order to turn it into something unique. Marc Garrett mentioned a collaborative project using Blockchain, where the public sends in a variation of instructions and characteristics for how a plant is going to look like. The artist sets out in the instructions given and constructs the piece. It frame the plant to be a shared co-curated art piece by the community instead of the sole artist.

A renowned example of DIWO would be Yoko Ono’s Cut piece. Through this art performance, the outcome was unpredictable and were decided by the characteristic of each audience. In this interactive collaborative piece, the audience became part of the artwork. Another example would be art installations such as Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Telegarden by Ken Goldberg made use of real time and technology enabling people to interact across a Third Space. It also transformed the audience into co-directors and the artwork itself, thus, resulting into unpredictable outcomes and a non-curated artist performance.

http://art2cblog.blogspot.sg/
http://artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/hole-in-space

 

In relation to DIWO and our micro-projects such as, “The Collective Body” displayed a feed of different body parts and faces on a Flickr group page to create a ‘metaphysically diversified body’. This allows each of us to co-curate the direction of the piece through our posts in different time and context. Micro-projects such as the tele-stroll, telematic embrace, social broadcast and exquisite glitch all embodies the idea of collaboration with peers and the public. For example, through the use of adobe connect, our class were able to communicate and negotiate together in order to perform mini-objectives to create a joint movement. Given that it was carried out in the third space, everybody was able to come live together no matter the location (just like how we connected and communicated with the artist, Marc Garrett). The main idea of these micro-projects were to encourage peer engagement and emphasise the idea of collaboration.

Furthermore, Marc Garrett commented that artists can bring positive influence and change towards the society. Whilst making art, Furtherfield practices environmental sustainability and aims to reduce their carbon footprint through the project, Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency where each encryption techniques are used to regulate units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, or operates independently of a central bank. This leads artists to be more conscious on the decision we make towards the society.

To conclude, the concept of DIWO allows artists from all over the globe to create something unexpected. It enables the capability to break the wall between the artist and the audience, exploring new mediums through experimentation. The media does not matter but the idea that is communicated towards the public is the key point. DIWO breaks down the individualism in DIY into collaboration. The DIWO culture has taken shape in the micro-projects that we did in class, in which enables the participant to achieve an outcome that would not be able to achieve through individuality. It is important for the society to know how to collaborate in order to move forward together as a community and build a better future for us, and not for one. However, even though the aim was to advocate DIWO in the new culture of technology and art, can we create something together, a new art culture perhaps off technology? Can we as a community physically collaborate and create together without the use of the web? Or are we all just stuck in the practice of new web culture?

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The glitch mini project was enjoyable as you distort one’s image into an unrecognisable artwork, collaboratively. We manipulated the images of our friends in freedom and to our own desire and it held the important factor of the DIWO (Do It With Others) in art. It is a transformation of a clear cut image to something abstract  and unrecognisable. This allow us to reach the end product together instead of a self manipulated and distorted photo which we can not achieve.