This event was live-screened in ADM’s game lab. I was showcasing the game-play for a new exploratory game that I just bought on Steam, and nothing much happens in the game, until …

*Reflection / Spoiler Alert* After an hour of being unable to resolve the Facebook Live split screen issue, Zhou Yang and I set on a rule-breaking adventure to connect the First and Third Spaces and even the Real-world and the Fourth-wall. We learnt later on that it was just a matter of downloading the right plugin or something like that. We were thankful, though, that Facebook Live made us so exhausted because we decided to do it in one-take without rehearsals. Zhou Yang plays games, unlike me, so he did a wonderful improv in the walk-through. The part I really like was when our cinematographer, Win Zaw, came into the frame at the very end.

We realise earlier on that the viewers will have to situate Zhou Yang and I within these spaces and that they would want to place me in the first space and Zhou Yang in the third, despite the fact we both are in the third space. So we had to clearly figure it out for ourselves before we could proceed with executing the performance. We wanted to speak about the convergence of all the worlds at the very end, hence the swapping of positions of Zhou Yang’s body and my body from our initial first/third spaces, and of course, the classroom full of the livebroadcast and the projector.

Our takeaway from this is that experimentation can only happen in film and performance when close to nothing is scripted and when ideas are acted upon and realized from accidental incidents. We also reflected on the locality of the first and the third space in relation to our being and came to some sort of an agreement that it really is up to the content provider, the participant, the viewer to perceive and decide their relationship with these spaces. They are all at once with geographical separation yet without boundaries, existing in simultaneity yet having, even if ever so slightly, different time frames. Schrodinger’s debate ensues. When encountering any first/third space conundrum, it is therefore important to situate oneself.