“Welcome to Electronic Cafe International” was a fascinating piece of reading, documenting the work of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and their seminal work, Hole-in-Space from 1980. It discussed greatly on the effects of the artwork on the people that had interacted with it and how their behavior changed after the event.
I found the artwork by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz an inspiration to our current society where social media dominated our daily life. It reminded us that social media could still be used for good. From the reading, it could clearly be seen that Hole-in-Space were one of the few early works(including the Videofreex) that experimented with the virtual space or what we know today as the “third space”.
There’s a quote from the reading that I would like to bring up as it would help with the research.
A virtual space creates social situation without traditional rules of etiquette. The absence of the threat of physical harm makes people braver.
I could not agree more with the reading. As society was often bound by rules and social norms, we could not always act or speak out what was on our mind, because we too were bounded by those restrictions. It acts as an invisible rope binds us to our roles and allowed us to function as a society. However, the “third space” removes all those restrictions and allow us to truly act and experiment. It allows creativity to flourish and interactions from different races to mingles and forge greater social bonds. An example that the reading gave was the Korean and the Black community was used to be each other’s enemy but after the artwork, the relationships between the two community improved greatly. This could never be achieved anywhere but through the “third space”.
The reading was closely related to our next week(week4) lesson on our social engagement with one another and how the “thirds space” invented new ways for us to interact. Hole-in-Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz should also be considered as a collective narrative, as it documented how a group of people behavior in front of the “hole”. It made us rediscover ourselves under a different light.
In conclusion, I have learned a great deal about the “third space” and how closely related it is to our behavior. It has proven time and time again that we are still not familiar with ourselves, but only through the “third space” can we safely experiment and understand a little more about us.