The Big Kiss: why?

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The Big Kiss (2007) performed by Annie Abraham. Two people, one of which is Annie Abraham, sit in two separate places in front of a webcam. Their two feeds go onto a screen split down the centre, and they ‘kiss’ each other through this screen. This screen is thus the third space which is discussed in Randall Packer’s ‘Third Space’ (2014). The two people seemed very ‘into’ the kissing, as if they were really in the same first space.  This kiss transcends the physical boundaries that they were once restricted by, even though the individuals cannot feel each other physically. Also, their emotions can be felt through the internet kiss.

rather, it is the pervasiveness of distributed space and the degree and myriad of ways in which we are constantly connected.

Interestingly enough, the Big Kiss does reflect a lot of people’s relationships nowadays. Many people now live away from their hometown and leave their love ones, and use internet means to keep in contact with them, no matter whether it is through Facetime, Skype or other platforms that enables us to see and hear each other in real time. We use texting platforms to communicate as well, albeit not exactly in real time so its asynchronous (which gives us the freedom and space to reply at our own pace.) The degree of communication is more intimate in the case of The Big Kiss, as they are forced to face each other in a very intimate (yet at the same time public) space, and not just communicate via their words but through their facial expressions and actions. This may not be the case for everyone who uses the same tools, but it leads us to question whether or not the third space allows the same level of intimacy and communication as the first space.

The penultimate paragraph of Randall Packer’s article pointed out something: that the third space can and may eventually become the new standard in the future. A point to note is the fact that Annie Abraham was born in 1954. She mostly grew up in a time where the internet did not exist. To have to fathom the fact that you can communicate with a person remotely (other than over the telephone) would have been difficult to understand. The increasing use of the internet and the tools that it lends in the 21st century, I imagine, would have been an interesting concept to explore for someone who didn’t rely on it in the past. The third space would have been difficult to understand. Whereas for the millennials, they grow up with the concept of a third space- the millennials don’t need to question how we are able to cross physical boundaries because it’s so commonplace. However, it would still be odd to see people attempting their own rendition of the Big Kiss on their personal devices in public in this day and age. This is probably because it is a very brave act of public display of affection, and would still warrant weird looks from people on the MRT or on the streets if you were to start looking very passionate kissing your phone. In the third space, maybe it would not look that odd, but in real life it would not get a good response from strangers.

This work was very intriguing, and does challenge people’s thoughts about the virtual realm- how does intimacy work virtually, and can it transcend the physical space into the third space? I believe that through this work, we have been able to get some answers to these questions, but I think this concept still requires some smoothening out in my mind to fully comprehend the purpose of the work.

OpenSourceCulture: summary

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Open Source Culture, from what I understand is the system where people in the community share resources so that we sort of bounce ideas and information off each other. This used to be used exclusively to describe software, but since then, has been used to describe various other things such as the idea of having an open (virtual) space for people to interact and work together- the DIWO idea instead of DIY.

I think this video is pretty useful in summarising the open source software bit in the first article. (I was honestly slightly confused with the first article and had to reread it a couple of times and google quite of few terms before understanding it.)

Having an Open Source Studio space allows the artist to move out of the ‘romantic notion of a solitary artist’ as Randall Packer says, and move into the world where everything is available on the web. Working alone is going to be a thing of the past, and the future is collaboration. Especially in a time such as this, we are able to communicate seamless over the web to people across the globe, and discuss about the ideas and influence artistic decisions. The open source concept challenges the proprietary model that has been working for a long time for monetary gains (because of the monopoly that the company holds in the market), and tries to change the perspective where we should work to improve and collaborate to create a inclusive space.

 

An example of an open source space is the concept of co working spaces popping up all over major cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Although this is different from a virtual collaborative space that we are currently on (Open Source Studio), we do see the element of collaboration in this physical space, rather than the typical office space where people are in individual cubicles. ‘Hot desks’ are places where you share a large communal desk with fellow co workers, and you will never know who you are going to end up next to. These co working spaces are especially useful for people in the start up business, as they are able to meet other people from different industries at the same place and there is a potential of working together in a future project, and there is an element of collaboration there! (i personally love the sound of a co working space, and one of the first places that i heard of is Colony in KL. you can take a look at the space here!)

 

(Sorry i forgot to tag it in Experimental Interaction, posted it last night!)

microproject#2: telestroll

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For this project, I was paired up with XiangRei, who happens to be one of my ex classmates from our previous school, Nanyang Junior College. We discussed about the telestroll and wanted it to be kept relatively simple- no need to travel outside of NTU, no need for fancy tricks in our video. The main point of our video was going to be about how our lives can briefly intersect at some point, but then separate once again (much like how many of our friends we sometimes lose contact with once we leave school), and we didn’t really want to distract from that point. We both have friends from NYJC we have lost contact with and we wanted to draw on that point.

So we began thinking of options we could take and one of them was the route that we take to school. Both of us stay in the same hall (Tamarind Hall) but we prefer different routes. She walks through the halls from Hall 10 to Hall 8) while I prefer to walk by the road which is one straight pavement up to ADM. We always have a mini deliberation when we start walking to and fro school before quickly deciding which side to walk.

We thought of ways to make the telestroll more interesting. We couldn’t possibly walk in silence for the entire length of the video, so we decided that we should make it into a conversation between the two of us. We usually end up walking together because we want to talk to each other on the way to school. (backstory: our conversations usually bounce off each other. we tend to ask each other questions about life because we already know the basic things to know about each other.) So we decided that our conversation should be related to the fact that our lives have intersected and may eventually diverge. So  the questions that we decided to ask each other was about our past, present and future.

my half of the questions

 

We also decided that we should exchange phones at the points that we meet again, in a way representing the fact that we can influence the people around us no matter how short a period of time we have with each other in our lives.

Actual problems that we faced was the problem where we could not use facebook live because we were not able to get the half half ratio on screen. We decided to use instagram live instead, which worked out better for us.

ACTUAL VIDEO:

FIRST FAILED VERSION:

TRIAL ON INSTALIVE:

****Here is the edited one! it is now on landscape.

 

microproject#1: socialbroadcasting

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Posted by Joce Sim on Thursday, 18 January 2018

 

So this is the first post for Experimental Interaction!

the interesting thing about the social broadcasting is that everyone’s live videos is collated in one space and is streamed simultaneously. It brings the idea of live videos to another level, whereby you don’t actually hear everyone’s videos individually but you see them as a cohesive whole. A thing that I dont think everyone takes note of is that we all film the same thing- we all headed to the ADM BBQ at B1, but you see the different perspectives of the same thing and you get to see everyone’s interactions with the environment and the people around them. The videos seen as a whole sort of gives the viewers an idea of how this group of people interact.

i would love to see this facebook live wall on a much larger scale, perhaps even in public spaces where even more people will be able to view the wall. It would be interesting to see how people in the public will interact with this work differently as they will already see other people doing it, and how they would make use of it. The idea of the third space hasn’t been explored much in sg and i would love to see it!