Third Space Fallacy-Trailer

For our final project called ‘Third Space Fallacy‘, we decided to set the context as a drama fight scene between two girls from our group, Bella and Daphne. Before we carried out our performance, which is the actual day of the fight at Jurong Point mall, the girls were each posting on their Instagram accounts, building up the tension and to spread awareness of their drama to their friends around in a subtle way. They would post contents such as screenshots of their  ‘planned’ conversations and emotional posts to hint at their rocky friendship, while inserting some polls here and there to ask their online audience for ‘help’ for the next move.

What the audience did not know was that, whenever they made a poll or replied to their stories, they were indirectly affecting the choices of the two girls. We wanted to reflect this about real-life situations were people would turn to social media to get advice about their problems and sometimes, the opinions of these people actually fuel negative effects and result in tragedy unimagined.

Similarly for this case, we found out from the polls that they led to a conclusion to their fight, which result in Bella having to confront Daphne about their fight. We then bring the situation to Jurong Point mall, where an actual fight scene between the two girls occurred and it is even captured on camera. We note down that the people around them during the ‘fight’ actually stole a few glances at them during the process, recording their response to the performance.

On top of that, we also created a fake story, along with a fake Instagram account to leak to some of the online audience that we would be carrying out our previous plan of playing games at Changi Airport to gather greater involvement from the audience in our current project. We soon realised that during the polling period, many amongst the online audience actually felt emotionally involved in the drama because they thought it was real. While some replied with casual comments, most people actually private messaged the girls to check up on what exactly happened with a concerned tone. We wanted our project to exactly reach this stage of uncertainty, where people might actually believe that the ‘planned’ drama was real.

From there, we made a fake news kind of trailer to convey the entire planned performance, ending with a result that was voted by the online audience unknowingly, which was Bella’s ‘death’.

We wanted to make use of Bella’s third space death to convey a message that online and offline comment matters a lot. While the people voted in the polls and replied to their posts, they are unknowingly making a choice for the parties involved and this actually led to someone’s death. There has been many articles whereby people get affected by what they see online and resulted in so many tragedies and we wanted to bring that message across.

When we were done with the trailer, Bella and Daphne released on instastory about how this was a performance for our final project, apologising for any misunderstanding and clearing the air.

We then posted the link to our youtube trailer on our fake Instagram account so that the people who followed us there would also be notified of the outcome of the actual performance.

Afterwards, Bella actually sent us screenshots of what her friends messaged her regarding the project.

I felt like it was really interesting to note how many people felt so emotionally involved in this fake drama, along with the responses we collected. The whole process felt like a collective experience, because we gather responses from the online audience about the drama, there were also people who came up to the girls in real-life to ask about the issue, and we also noted responses from strangers at Jurong Point mall where the ‘fight’ took place. It was a success to us that many thought that it was real which was something we wanted to achieve from blast theory. The lines between reality and fictional is blurred and it made an impact in not just Bella’s and Daphne’s life, but the others who were involved indirectly as well, making them involve in this ‘game’ which came in the form of a friendship drama.

Last but not least, thanks to the team who made it all possible!!

Third Space Fallacy-Intro

A Third Space Fallacy is an experimental interaction performance on third and first space that combines the responses collated on the third space through Instagram polls and stories to curate the next move in a friendship conflict between two girls (Bella and Daphne). To make the entire performance as real as possible, both girls had to put up an act in the span of 1 week in the first space, when questions arises from the people around them. Also, to stage that this is not part of our project for Experimental Interaction, our group have created another Instagram account @abracadabrrun, collating uninformed decisions made by our followers, which is part of the narrative of the death of Bella.

We initially wanted the project to take place at Changi Airport, where we would make use of Instagram polls for our online audience to decide on the various missions to be carried out with real life audience like a game to eliminate our group members. However, upon further discussion, we felt that albeit the game can involve both online and offline audience in the fun, it was lacking in emotional investment whereby it would just be a game and nothing else. Audience involved would not feel a certain connection to it and it would be more of enjoyment solely for us, the group members. Thus, we came up with the above idea, hoping to make use of the idea of uninformed choice, and to get the audience emotionally and physically involved in a ‘realistic’ drama fight scene.