Category: Micro-Project

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Research Critique 3 : The Art of Destruction

“The user has to realise that improving is nothing more than a proprietary protocol, a deluded consumer myth about progression towards a holy grail of perfection. ”
Glitch Studies Manifesto, Menkman, R.

The conventional way that we see things nowadays as practical, improving human beings is that the only way to go is up. Everything has to be newer, better or more technologically advanced in order for it to be considered desirable, and I found that concept so toxic and boring. The idea that the old always has to make way for the new, that everything that can and should be wanted should be what we envision them to be; brand new, shiny and wrapped in a thin piece of plastic just to protect it from scratches.

Perhaps there doesn’t have to be a world where the only things that are worth paying attention to are the things that are still shiny and squeaky from just being unboxed. Perhaps everything that has been taught to us, that new is always better, is a lie, and that there is an equal amount of beauty in death and decay as there is in having to constantly try to upgrade and be better. The idea that having to constantly climb up a steep hill of improvement being a consumer myth really intrigued me, and I feel that Menkman R. has a point in saying that we were trained to look this way, especially with the way advertising and commercialising has come.

Everyday we are fed the idea that new is always better, that we should always work hard to afford nice things. The latest phones, the newest clothes, the hippest clubs in town are just some of the everyday things that people dream of having or wanting, and maybe we would not have been that way if not for the 21st century atmosphere.

I wanted to create a project that made people have a new way of looking at things and especially people.

“Those systems might be broken, they might be glitched, and they might be imperfect and noisy, and that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. But still they are functional or functioning in one way or another systematically. So they are connected to one another as assemblages.”
John Cates

Just because rotting fruits are imperfect and unwanted by us does not mean that they are not functional or functioning in another way. In the viewpoint of John Cates, the rotting fruits are just another step in mother nature’s plan. Only because they are of no use to us that they are deemed as unwanted, useless and disgusting. At the end of the day, these fruits will be homes to flies and maggots or be food to other animals and insects, and thus become an important part of the cycle of life and death.

Symbolically, I wanted them to stand for society as different sections and representations of people in the society that we live in. People all peak at different times in their lives; just because they aren’t who they want to be right now does not mean that they will not get there, and it also does not mean that you, as another human being, have any right to judge whether or not they will get anywhere.

Perhaps it is just in us to only notice the things we seek; to look at the wealth that people have, or the cars they drive or the homes they own. Parallel to Menkman’s mindset, my project aims to allow people to understand that perhaps, just because some people aren’t what we are looking for, does not mean we necessarily don’t need them. Perhaps always looking for people better or more skilled than ourselves is a mindset that we’ve been trained and forced to adapt to, that it may not be the best for us.

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Micro Project 5 : The Art of Destruction

The slowest but surest form of destruction : decay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For this project I decided to go with the slowest and most definite form of destruction : decay.

Above you can see the attached images of the fruits before I allowed for them to rot and decay. Below are the images of the rotting and decayed fruit.

The intention of this project was simple : to illustrate society in a nutshell.

While not blatantly obvious, I designed for this fruit platter to be a depiction of society. I chose fruits that rotted at different speeds. For example, apples and grapes were reportedly harder to rot than persimmons and bananas. The idea for the choosing of different fruits was to demonstrate variety and a difference in the speed of rotting.

I wanted for the platter to be a symbolic representation of society. At first glance everyone seems to be prim and proper and at their best. To some, certain fruits look more appetising and appealing than the others. However as time passes most of them begin to decay and rot and become unappealing, while others withstand the test of time and look pretty much about the same as they did before.

The idea of this project was for people to understand that first of all, no matter who or what you are, nothing escapes the undying grasp of time. Eventually, what comes from dust will fade to dust and no matter what you do or how you look right now, everything disappears at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the fat kid who got his wallet stolen every other day or the quarterback jock who pushed past peoples’ queues.

Yet at the same time, it serves for people to realise that not everyone peaks at the same time in their life. It may hold true that the fruits all look equally enticing from the before picture but in the after picture I can quite confidently say that the grapes look the most appetising.

Destruction, in the case of this art piece, helps show a difference. A difference in appearance, most straightforwardly, and in a deeper level, a difference in the points in time where the fruits look individually the greatest. This piece forces people to feel uncomfortable by looking at the image of rotting fruits, and that is why the image is impactful.

On yet another level, decay gives life. While it may seem like the death of the fruits, it also is the birth of the fungi. The fruits are now home to maggots who eventually morph into flies. The very carcasses of the fruits are now the embryo in which new life is bred, and in this sense this art piece isn’t merely about destruction; it’s also a form of creation.

 

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Micro Project 6 : Super Participation

This micro project required for us to attempt posting our lives online as much as possible for a 24 hour window in order to create a form of digital identity.

Thoughts

Personally I felt that this project was really difficult as it just wasn’t in my personality to post everything I do online. A lot of the times by the time I remember that I have to post something online, the moment is already gone, and I have to scramble to find something or anything left of that moment to post online. This, while it does sound like a shortcoming in the completion of this project, has actually led to some interesting insights I have had about this project.

Between myself and Joseph

Joseph and I are on the two opposite ends when it came to this project; no matter what happened, he was always on the ball of his feet when it came to posting things online. When he was going to class, he’d post an update along with a selfie attached. When he reaches class, he also takes a picture with his classmates and of course, posts it online with a catchy caption. 

It comes naturally to someone like Joseph to share everything he does online (and it is no wonder he has so many Instagram followers), and while this is no shortcoming, it does reveal a very unsettling truth that probably anything and everything about Joseph can be found online.

Living in the 21st Century they say that there is nothing that cannot be found online; with the availability of personal data online to multinational corporations, there have been algorithms and patterns created in order to best determine a person’s personality and therefore the type of commercial products or commercials that they would be interested in. Along with the issue of data scandals such as Facebook’s scandal with Cambridge Analytica, the reveal of such information online could pose to be detrimental to us in the future.

My personal identity

It came to me that while I feel that my life was quite boring in that 24 hour window, I tried my best to make it look as interesting as possible. I thought to myself, why bother? Does it matter that much that my life was interesting? Is it so important to me that I have to portray my life as “happening”?

And the fact is that it does. Even though it isn’t in my nature to want to post any and everything possible under the sun, if I am going to post something I may as well make it interesting right?

This results in me ending up posting a persona of myself that is more interesting or more importantly, different from who I am. I don’t necessarily have the most interesting of friends who can all recite 100 digits of pi, but it just happens to be a unique talent of one of my friends. I don’t necessarily sit in excessively long transits home over the weekend pondering over what I’m going to do this weekend or where I’m headed in my life, yet I try my best to make myself appear sophisticated and thoughtful as a human being. The truth was, I probably slept half that transit away and got home only to sleep some more.

It is therefore true that my digital persona differs from reality. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

For example, people look up body builders’ social media accounts to get a glimpse of what bodybuilders do or what they eat or what they bench. They look into these accounts mostly for this kind of information, because that is what the bodybuilder is known for doing. Quite hardly do you hear of people looking at body builders for the kind of pen they use or the kind of pet they have; this information is essentially redundant in a bodybuilders’ social media accounts. Sure, they create a form of intimacy between the audience and the bodybuilder himself by allowing the audience to understand that the bodybuilder has a normal life and has things that he does aside from bodybuilding, but it doesn’t take away the fact that the main reason these audiences or followers of the bodybuilder follow him is because he bodybuilds, and that they are interested in his bodybuilding. It doesn’t have to be how they can be like him, it can also be about how he takes pictures or how his pictures look good. At the end of the day, they’re interested in his bodybuilding and less of him as a whole person.

Creating an online digital persona of yourself could therefore allow yourself to be more marketable, because people know what to expect when they look you up. Instead of having to scroll past 10 posts of you falling asleep in bed or looking at the scenery you see, they get to see you benching or giving advice on bodybuilding or simply looking at the improvements you have made as a bodybuilder. And while this helps you and your cause, it makes a simple statement that an online and digital persona, while plausibly accurate, can also be easily falsified.

It thus teaches us as both posters and audiences of social media that we have to be careful of what we post and what we take in as information about someone else.

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Research Critique 2

The Third Space is an opportunity.

The third space offers an opportunity like no other for collaboration; a space not limited to the constraints of the physical. Suddenly, the biggest problem of all between collaborating artists is gone. The problem of distance, and not having a common ground to showcase works of art, has been made null by the existence of a common ground accessible to not only both artists without problem, but also all audiences.

With technology, nothing is impossible anymore online. If you ever were short of materials such as paint or pencils, fret no more because computers allow you to make digital art that look just like traditional art without having to fret over the costs of paint or paper. If you ever lacked the time or the workshops to create 3D art, computers allow you to render 3D mockups to make sure you don’t waste that much time prototyping and having to be constrained to your imagination as to how the project would look like in reality. With the boundless possibilities of what a computer can do, the third space has not only allowed for limitless connectivity and collaboration, it has also collapsed several key problems that have held artists back. Any constraint that’s physical, all those aren’t problems anymore.

On top of all of that, the ability to collaborate LIVE is yet another perk the third space has offered. An issue with an online platform is always intimacy; how does the art feel real? How does a digital illustration of the Mona Lisa differ from that of the real deal sitting in the Louvre?

They say that no matter how many times you tell a child the pot is hot, he’ll still have to touch it just to be sure, and I quite relate to this statement. Nothing feels quite as real as having a piece of art to hold in your hands or touch with your palms. The physical being of it is enough to add an extra layer to the art that digital art just cannot replicate. That is one of the biggest flaw of art being digital, yet it doesn’t change the fact that art in the third space can be intimate.

With live feeds, the ability to interact in real time gives art in the third space a different kind of life. To know that you can work in real time with someone halfway across the globe and create art, that is beauty in itself. It may not be pixel perfect, or even time-synced perfectly, but all these tiny flaws add beauty to what we call art in the third space. The fact that we can attempt to interact in real time on a platform that is virtual adds intimacy to our art, to tell audiences and to tell ourselves that it is possible to create art regardless of physical boundaries.

With neutral objects in between, we can always try our best to falsify a feeling of realness. Throwing objects, moving objects or drawing the same object across screens; such actions that try to combine the actions of two separate parties into creating one single form of art or movement create a single art piece. The idea of creating a single object despite being in two different locations being brought across allows for two artists to bring across an image of togetherness in the creation of something.

And just like that, as long as there is a fluidity in movement and speech of the two artists, a connection is created. It allows for the audience to feel a collaboration in the works; that there isn’t just one artist but two. Two artists creating one art piece.

My project with Melody

In our little endeavour, we tried to create the illusion of throwing food across two screens with the help of our friends. In that way, the audience essentially see the magic of food being thrown from Melo’s hand in one location and magically appearing in another location into my mouth. While it may not be the most realistic of art pieces or even the most interesting, the struggles and laughter that came along with creating the art piece are what made it real. Because of the time lag that came with using an internet connection and streaming live, people start to empathise with us as artists and laugh along with us with each attempt we make in order to try and get it right.

By using the third space we have allowed for us to do something “impossible”. The third space was a platform for us to create an illusion that something like this was possible.

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Micro Project II (DIWO)

HOW IT WORKS

“[…] art has become too narcissistic and self-referential and divorced from social life. I see a new form of participatory art emerging, in which artists engage with communities and their concerns, and explore issues with their added aesthetic concerns“  (Bauwens 2010)

Our project revolved around the idea of peoples’ perspectives on fear and love.

By asking people to draw their worst fears in pink and their favourite things in existence in pink on separate sheets of paper without giving any information on what the art piece is about, we force people to rethink the associated feelings that they have with certain colours; arachnophobiacs have just drawn their worst fear in the colour of Hello Kitty’s hairpin.

The intention lies for the audience to eventually understand that their fears can be made manageable by perspective and that what they fear may be another person’s love.

 

WHY IT’S D.I.W.O

It brings all actors to the fore, artists become co-curators alongside the curators, and the curators themselves can also be co-creators.

The success on the piece hinges on the collective effort of the audience, who in this case, are also the artists. Without a significant enough number of entries, the piece would not have its intended effect, and thus without an audience there would be no art piece. Such is a characteristic of D.I.W.O., which, in essence, draws upon the sum effort of several and not just a singular artist to determine both its meaning and its form.

 

SIMILAR WORKS OF ART

Swarmsketch is a website that allows for each user to contribute one line to a popular search topic that changes weekly. An additional function allows the users to vote for the thickness of another user’s contribution, leading to very interesting outcomes.

Akin to our piece, Swarmsketch only works if there is a significant amount of contributions, otherwise a single line of consistent thickness could hardly make anything distinguishable.