Connecting with others (by Felicia and Hazel)

Synopsis

My team’s telematics performance is about connecting with others that you don’t know through third space. In this project, it is performed in the 2d and 3d room. I’m supposed to “connect” to five other strangers by doing different actions with them. There are five levels to each action and as the level proceed the intimacy level of it increases. The five actions start off with E.T. finger pointing, Hi-Five, heart shape, scissors-paper-stone and finally followed by kissing through the third space. We combined both crowdsource and telematics performance together and came out with this idea.

Analysis

To me, third space is a space that is formed when combining a physical space and a remote space together. It is a space that allows us to communicate and interact through any platform/mediums as long as it connects people from a different location that is far apart. Be it through games, virtual or non-virtually.

Boundaries of third space can be collapse by allowing people to have a real life, real-time experience despite staying at different location creates a form of an illusion of “realness”. For example, in my group’s telematics performance, the Facebook live was happening in real-time and interactions can be received and reacted instantaneously. As a result, it creates a connected space as if we are in the same space/environment interacting despite being at a different location. If our project happened to have any time lag, I believe the result will not be as believable. It breaks the illusion and unique experience of third space.

The intimacy of third space can be created by tricking ourselves of having the illusion of feeling intimate with our senses and real-time experience. For example, visually, anything that we see that is life size naturally we will find it realistic and believable. Such visuals in turns lead us into believing in the sense of touch. In addition, listening to the sound in a real-time manner further making us into believing that third space is a reality. Likewise in my project, we included a lot of such touching, visual and real-time experience which brings a new perspective towards intimacy whereby one does not need to be physically present to feel intimate. Rather, we create intimacy by sharing the same space. Even if the platform is different such as speaking or texting through phone, you will still feel the sense of sharing the same time or moment.

 

“The third space is a fluid matrix of potentiality and realizable connections to the most far-reaching remoteness.”

• “A space with no geographical boundaries.”

For my project, I have “touched” our participants by doing the action first and let them synchronize their action with me in the middle of the split screen. It has to be at the right distance and connecting point in order for it to work or feels real. Before we start our Facebook live, we have technical issues and we solve it by communicating in another third space platform which is Whatsapp. During the live video, we collaborate with one another by giving gesture hints or simply speak to each other through facebook live to work things out.

Other examples

Our project is similar to examples such as the Telematics Dreaming by Paul Sermon and The Big Kiss by Annie Abrahams. Both our project and the given examples play with the idea of make using our sense of visual and touch to connect with strangers in an intimate manner. However, both projects differ in ours being able to speak and communicate, while the examples mentioned above doesn’t.

Reflection

Before this project, I only view third space as a platform for communicating or socializing purposes. However, my role as the participant of this project makes me notice how “real” and “intimate” the experience could actually be in this third space. Doing all the other four action was fine but until the last part, which is kissing, deep down I hesitated a bit before I actually act upon it. I didn’t expect this as I thought I know very well that this space is “fake”. However, turns out that subconsciously I felt that it is rather “real”.