For this Microproject, we were asked to express our alter ego. I imagine myself to be able to afford the time of day to choose which mode I want to live my life in, whether it is in black and white, in full colour or in slow motion. In my video, I explore my ability to take my time to choose what I want in life rather than just being forced into the life I lead now.
For this project, I know we are able to use sound to our advantage but in my case, I chose to use the lack of sound to express my point. When you are choosing something, you don’t necessarily want the extra voices in your head to affect your choice. Thus, I left sound out out this.
I chose to do a screen recording to show that maybe, in an alternate universe, humans will be able to choose the mode they would like to live in on their own brain machine things.
This is my desktop. I am my desktop. Disorganised, multi-tasking all the time. I always have my telegram chats up on the side, ready to reply any chats from my friends. I guess that would be the more intimate social interaction that I have, not so much of Facebook and Instagram. I then have my Spotify, playing my worship songs as I do my work on my laptop. It usually keeps me more calm while doing work. This tab kind of shows how much I rely on the songs to keep me going through the last nights. The next tab behind is the Chrome window, where I do most of my research and work on. On my actual desktop lies my to-do list, lurking with my deadlines, and the files that are important to me. Also, Photoshop is always open in the background because I guess I use it too often for it to be switched off.
So this past week we tried using adobe connect in class! Adobe connect allowed us to be in the first space and third space at the same time, since we were doing the adobe connect activity in class, and we could see each other physically and virtually.
We completed little tasks that Randall Packer set for us: align your fingers with the person sitting next to you, form a cross across the screen, align your pens so that a line forms across the screen.
It was vital for everyone to in a way, negotiate with each other on the screen to allow this to work. We needed to gauge the distance away from the webcam, the angle in which we were pointing our objects to, the way we placed our objects. This was unspoken negotiation that we did mostly virtually: we didn’t actually communicate in the first space for this and our eyes were glued onto the screen so that we could see the other people. This was especially evident when one person’s laptop ran out of battery in the midst of the project, as she remained frozen on screen while the rest of us were still doing the activity. She looked (unfortunately) awkward in the midst of all of us engrossed in the class work because in a way she wasn’t able to negotiate since her laptop died. Obviously this isn’t done on purpose but it showed the importance of the negotiation that takes place in the third space.
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.
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!
So this past week we tried using adobe connect in class! Adobe connect allowed us to be in the first space and third space at the same time, since we were doing the adobe connect activity in class, and we could see each other physically and virtually.
