Category: Internet Art & Culture

Micro-Project: Pirate Broadcasting

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzlSxlG9BDA]

Broadcasting from the SRC: My attempt at the Ronaldinho Crossbar Challenge

And here is the original video from Nike featuring Ronaldinho:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6JdxaDDzb8]

Obviously, I am no Ronaldinho. Oh well.

 

Research Critique: Paul Sermon – Telematic Dreaming

“…our sense of reality is fragmented and juxtaposed: a remix of relationships, images, and memories.” – Packer, R., “The Third Space”

“Telematic Dreaming” by Paul Sermon succinctly presents this notion of the third space. The work consists of 2 beds in different locations, one which is blue-screened and another for the participant to experience the work. The artist lies on the blue-screened bed, where his image is captured live and video projected onto the second bed. It is with this image which the participant interacts with. Sermon invites his audience to lie on the bed and interact with him. Pre-recorded imagery is also projected onto the participant’s bed, creating different textures and shapes. At the same time, another camera captures video of the participants bed and plays it on a screen, reinforcing the idea of people interacting in a different space; the third space.

The artist, Paul Sermon, on his bed

View of the participants bed with projection of the artist

View of the participants bed with projection of the artist

This video documents the work:
[vimeo 44862244 w=500 h=375]

Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon (1993) from V2_ on Vimeo.

This video illustrates the work where the artist is not present; viewers are invited to take his place on the blue-screened bed.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2HhY_8FO2c]

This work really foresaw the use of technology for long-distance communication, especially for maintaining relationships. The bed, an intimate piece of furniture, becomes a physical incarnation of the shared space between the people. Furthermore, in allowing the participant to see himself/herself on a screen with the image of the artist, Sermon effectively toyed with their sense of reality.

I found that it was particularly interesting to watch how people would respond to the moving image of the artist. Nowadays, we are used to seeing videos that try to alter our sense of reality – for example 3D movies – but I assume it was rather novel in 1993. When the artist moves his hand toward the participant, there’s always some sort of reaction, even though the participant knows that it’s just an image. I think this demonstrates the visual nature of us humans, in how it can overrule our logical thinking.

Overall, I think that this work still maintains its value after 2 decades – I feel that although the presentation of the work may have remained almost the same, its meaning has evolved over time. Not because of the work, but because of the people. As Randall Packer wrote, “But most startling is the fact that the third space is simply an integral fact of everyday life in the 21st century. (Packer, R)” Instead of introducing people to an intimate third space, “Telematic Dreaming” now also has the power to remind people of the distinction between the spaces we inhabit.

Research Critique: The Pirate Cinema, Nicolas Maigret

“In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing visible.” – The Pirate Cinema

This quote, taken from the abstract written on the website of the artwork, sums up pretty much exactly what we see in the work. It is truly an amazing piece of art, one which uncovers and presents to viewers the invisible network connections happening every second all around the world. As someone who has used torrents before, this work really fascinated me and got me thinking about two different perspectives of torrenting; one from the perspective of the user, and the other from the perspective of the producer of the original work.

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There are 3 main segments in the website, each presenting a different form of the work. The first is the installation of the work. The setup consists of 3 projectors, projecting live-streamed, intercepted data of torrents. Also included is the information of the users – their countries and their IP addresses are shown at the top of each screen. After watching the entire video on the website, I was still hungry for more. The torrents are ever-changing, each scene not more than a second long. This makes it feel as if I were watching snippets of a film – just teasers, without the complete picture. It was also fascinating because I could recognize some scenes as being part of a TV series or movie that I had watched. The quality of the scenes also evoke a sense of a poor quality or lagging stream which gave me a minor headache actually, adding to the sense of claustrophobia of data.

Screen Shot 2015-09-01 at 3.30.40 PMThe next segment of the website is an online version of the work. Anyone is now able to view the work, live, on their computers. My first thought was something like, “Wow, now I’m seeing what other people are sharing REAL TIME”, and I was really amazed. I realized that I could actually be involved in the work if I wanted to, all I had to do was download a torrent. This ability to visualize the data being transferred is more than just showing who is downloaded what; it is showing us how the media itself works.

“With Netartizens.tv, we intend to engage a full social and artistic agenda that stretches across disciplinary, geographical, and cultural boundaries, exploring real-time interaction and dialogue between artists, performers, viewers and audience-participants.” – The NetArtizens Project

At this point, I already feel that this work parallels the ideas of NetArtizens.tv. Using data, the artist has managed to achieve a work which spans the entire globe, creating a dialogue between everyone involved, and anyone who wants to be involved.

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This series of screenshots are taken from the third segment of the website; this one details the performance version of the work. In it, the artist covers a total of 7 acts. These acts provide a context to the torrent data presented in the work. He talks about the different media (TV shows, movies, music, porn, etc.) being torrented around the world, the different ways in which users label the torrents, and the copyright infringement case between Metallica and Napster, among other things. It revealed alot more about this hidden world of torrents and gave interesting bits of information to think about while viewing the work.

After viewing the installation and the online version, I felt that the video of the performance version was a really neat way to round things off. It provided interesting insights into how the world of torrents work and the way people differentiate between torrents. More than that, it showed me the astounding amount of artistic work available to everyone that without torrents, would probably remain undiscovered and unseen by most of us. To me, this means that the torrent world gives us much more than we can imagine, but at the same time takes away alot from the artists who create the work. I personally would like to see a kind of compromise between the two, but it’s hard to imagine how that would happen.

 

Research Critique – Jenny Holzer: Please Change Beliefs

This interactive web artwork mainly invites users to modify truisms provided by the artist. When the user clicks on the word change, he is given the main list of truisms from which he can choose any one to modify. His modified version then goes to an alternative list. The topics of these truisms range from love to murder, encapsulating a wide spectrum of comments upon which users are free to change any or all parts of them.

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While there is a slight learning curve on how to navigate the site, I eventually recognized the different parts to it and the links between them. There are essentially 5 main sections to the site: the Truisms, the Inflammatory Essays, the Living, the Survival and the Lament sections. Of these, the truisms, living and survival sections are similar in style, containing just a line or two and the inflammatory essays and lament sections containing passages. The site cycles from truisms to lament sections, switching between sections at seemingly random points. The home page shows a truism, and three words, “Please change beliefs”. Clicking on either of these 3 words will redirect the user to something different. I found that it was not immediately clear that the site will automatically cycles between the sections, and indeed it took me some time to figure out that there were 5 different sections. Each section has its own characteristic, from the layout of the text, the background colour, and sometimes a video is included, such as this: abuse

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Changing the truisms is only one part of the work. If the user clicks on the word ‘BELIEFS’, he is also able to ‘vote’ for which truisms he agrees with, and the results are updated accordingly, showing how many people agree with which truism.

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Looking at the alternative list of truisms generated by the changes made by all the users, I could also see how people used the truisms differently, each edit showing how different people are able to modify the truisms to create their own truisms. In doing so, I realized that they were all communicating anonymously in the ‘virtual space’, providing insights into their own personal beliefs and thoughts. It almost seems like a global, public game of ‘exquisite cadaver’, whereby the truisms are taken apart and put together with new elements, forming a new, unique truism.

In many ways this work serves to illustrate that what is true for someone may not necessarily be as true for someone else. The thought-provoking truisms and passages sometimes seem to form their own narrative, each hyperlink bringing the user into a new direction. I think that if the public’s modified truisms could somehow be incorporated into this cycle, it would enrich the experience for both new and returning members of the virtual public.

Blog Narrative

This is a story about the consequences of a birthday celebration. The guy holding the blue box in the background is the birthday boy, YX. We’d just celebrated his birthday in a typical drinking fashion and this is a photo of the three of us at a carpark at Sentosa at around 2 or 3am (I think). As obscene as this photo may look, the guy with his head on my lap is really just sleeping/drunk/unconscious.

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Honestly, I’m not very sure why I was sitting on the floor with him or why his head was on my lap. I don’t remember posing for the photos either. Actually, until I recently revisited this photo, I didn’t remember that it was a birthday celebration.

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Here we are again, out of the carpark and somewhere in Sentosa. What I remember is that we stumbled along some path until we came across this huge tent. It was probably set up for some event planned for the next day, but the entrance was open and we went in to lie down.

Once again, I have no recollection of this photo having been taken. However, these photos all somehow appeared in my phone. Hence, I truly appreciate the modern day advantages of having cameras in our pockets wherever we go, to capture these memories that otherwise would forever remain forgotten.

 

How might the open source system of sharing and collective narrative be a creative inspiration and approach for artists?

For artists, the open source system is one which allows a better mode of communication, a freely available and vast source of inspiration, as well as a platform upon which they may easily share their own works. The scale in which artists are enabled to reach people and fellow artists have already resulted in numerous new creative works, for example, Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz’ “Hole in Space”, which allowed people in New York to see other people in Los Angeles in real-time, and vice versa.

In contemporary times, artists now have access to millions of people’s thoughts, opinions and comments thanks to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms facilitate a shared and often spontaneous collective narrative, each post organised through tags and hashtags. This form of collective narrative can roughly be seen in Douglas Davis’ 1994 “World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence”, where the artist invited the online public to compose a single sentence collaboratively.

The open source system provides the artist with tools to reach out to the public, to invite them to interact and communicate, as well as a huge repository of individuals’ ideas and thoughts from which the artist may draw inspiration from. In this way the open source system could be a creative inspiration and approach for artists.