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!

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?

Across ‘Borders’ – Telematic Embrace

Introduced to the world of Adobe Connect, it was the first time I have heard and experienced this application. In class, we experimented and immersed ourselves into the Third space as a team.

We talked about emotional bandwidth expanded over the years, from simple texting, to calling, to Facetime and social broadcasting. Through the development of this, we are able to view the expression the other party holds and the movement they display through the video, fully engaging in the conversation and response. As a class, we were all in one place (first space), and stepped into the virtual world of third space. We played and interacted with different type of movements and objects through the third space, connecting us together.

Here are some of the things we did through screenshots:

“The Third Space ET Touch”
“Water Bottle Filter”
“PINNKCHROME”
“BLUECHROME”

As a class we worked together as a team through connection, negotiation and compromising each other in order to achieve these masterpieces shown above. We were all involved and crossing the borders of our screen in order to connect with one another. This is an absolute example of DIWO (Do It With Others)! I had an incredible time playing in the third space with my class and this experiment. It is definitely an important skill and realisation to have in the future where we have to interact and work with clients across the border, TOGETHER.

Micro-Project #2: Telescroll (Social Broadcasting)

Posted by Daphne Natimin on Tuesday, 23 January 2018

As the remaining three amigos, we decided to do a double pairing, in which my partner became Bella. After a few brainstorms, we decided to do something ordinary for girls, something that happens daily for most girls. This led to the idea of girls getting ready together. Have you ever wondered why girls go to the bathroom together or even do things almost together all the time? Its fun! We get an increase of communication in order to further deepen the relationship and understanding of each other.

There will always be this one time when your friend, a close friend, best friend or even a family member who would move away to another country for a certain reason, which decreases the communication between the two or more. Through the interaction of doing things together online/media makes up for it. It serves the purpose to show that even if one may not be physically next to each other, they could always meet in the third space, connecting people together. For example, leaving each other on call whilst doing work, eating or even casual chilling. This is also the reason why Facebook, Skype or OSS was programmed. ITS ABOUT CONNECTING, COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION.

During the process of the live performance, it was quite hard to mirror the other accurately and synchronise, even though some were pre-planned. Research has shown that the more time you spend with another the more synchronise you get in terms of movements- due to our mirror neurons. However, as time passed, we slowly became more synchronised in terms of the timing on getting ready. Furthermore, rather than a casual live broadcast, it felt more of a performance art in synchronisation in the third space. This was a pleasant experience in dabbling in the social art and doing it in real time, different location. It creates a new space for the art where people from all over the world can come together!

Open Source Studio (OSS)

Leaping one step further into expanding the digital world and innovative platforms, such as Linux or GNU, Randall Packer went ahead and expanded these innovations by creating the Open Source Studio (OSS).

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

The term open source originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. Open Source Studio (OSS) is a joint, online software environment programmed to meet the needs and dynamics of studio-based teaching in the media arts, where it is open publicly. It provides new potential for artists to collaborate or produce peer to peer artistic results amplified by the network. Furthermore, it exposes open source thinking to challenge and inspire peers. Encouraging the cross pollination of ideas and process for in-depth understanding and learning in order to produce artistic fruitage. This leads to the emphasis of DIWO (Do It With Others). 

Through OSS, peer to peer interaction became more inclusive where concepts were easily understood through the reference of the documentation of peers.  It also allows us to see or read in different perspectives or manipulation, in order to achieve a broader mind. Moreover, engaging on online discussion, comments or feedback. Creative inspiration comes from the ‘outdoors’, where social interaction stands. OSS promotes the fairness to artists to document or reference anything, however, it crosses a blur line onto the laws of plagiarism and copyrights. 

OSS is all about the collaborative practices among peer groups that share goals, methods, ideologies, and aspirations that helps all of us grow. 

http://www.memes.com/advice-yoda/104