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.

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.

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!