Do it with OTHERS

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The DIWO culture is very apparent through all the works we have done throughout the past couple of weeks, not just in the third space but also in the first space. the third space makes collaborating even more possible because of the accessibility of the internet, though I believe that there are traditional ways of collaborating as well.

DIWO is a gift of resistance in the 21st Century, exploring relational and hybrical realizations. It is socially informed, constantly adapting, intuitive and grounded. It can collide with mainstream culture but also exist deeper in the networked shadows, in accordance to the needs of who ever participates at any given time. –Marc Garrett (2014)

I think it is interesting to think of DIWO as a ‘gift of resistance’. Instead of having everything made to be aesthetically pleasing, I see how the exquisite glitch can be an art in itself- the process that the image goes through to become the way that it ends up at, how each person gives the image their own personal touch, whether it is scaling the image, pixelating it or liquifying the image. It is basically resisting the idea that the picture must be perfectly framed or taken at a certain time of day, and makes it socially and artistically acceptable to have a different aesthetic. The work adapts to whatever situation it is placed in, no matter the social context it was initially taken in. As the image gets passed through the different hands, the image is manipulated to form a different kind of aesthetic that reflects the person’s frame of mind at the time, and the end product is much more interesting as you look at the different stages that it had gone through to reach the end point. You end up with a collective narrative.

In the 21st century, it is also important to note how DIWO is relevant to the Third Space, since it introduces another dimension to DIWO. More than just doing things online, we can do things online together. The Telestroll microproject highlighted how we can use the internet to our advantage, as it can incorporate the first and third space together. Felicia and Bala’s collaboration on the Telestroll encapsulates this well, since they ‘collaborated’ with the people that they saw on the streets and interviewed, as well as collaborated with each other via the Facebook live. This would not have been possible if done alone or without the help of the third space.

Going beyond the paradigm is not easy when you do it alone, but when you collaborate, it is more possible. After all, two (or more) brains are better than one.

BURN BURN BURN

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Image result for media burnAnt Farm is a avant garde art group founded in San Francisco by Chip Lord and Doug Michels. As a group, Ant Farm did Media Burn (1975) which addressed the pervasive nature of the television in many people’s lives. It confronts people directly as the work was made to imitate a real life event that would have been televised for all to see, and poked fun at what people usually would deem as a serious topic. It took something serious and brought it to the art context and changed the purpose of the ‘news coverage’ and the audience’s reaction.

I have to say that Ant Farm and Media Burn resembles the idea of Andy Warhol’s Factory (although their purposes are different) Andy Warhol’s Factory ran from 1962 to 1984 and it was basically a studio space in New York where artists gathered and contributed to the iconic silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol, as well as provided a breeding ground for the artists to collaborate. One famous group that emerged from the Factory is The Velvet Underground, which made the collaboration the Velvet Underground and Nico possible. Perhaps it is the fact that both of the groups are breeding grounds for collaboration and this is what is most important to both these groups: to do things with others. Another point where they resemble each other is that Andy Warhol sort of poked fun at the popular culture in the American culture with his soup can sales and print sales. The television culture was growing in importance and Ant Farm took it and poked fun at it. The funny thing is that the mainstream media covered it as well, without fully knowing the purpose of the artwork, and manifested the work further as it poked fun at the television culture.

(Sidenote: Singapore tried to get something like this happening, The Artist Village (TAV)! Founded by Tang Da Wu, in Sembawang, and it subsequently moved to Pulau Ubin because of the government reclaiming the land at Sembawang. The Artist Village is less active nowadays but the residency is still happening (I think), and one of my cousins is actually a member of TAV. It would be so powerful to see something like Media Burn happen in Singapore, but it probably wouldn’t be that feasible with the political and social stigma in Singapore.)

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!)