Category: Research

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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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Final Project : Project IDLE PROCESS

Artist References

BLAST THEORY – I’D HIDE YOU

“Can we trigger that uncanny thrill that you feel when you see a webcam for the first time and experience a portal into another part of the world that seems – at that moment – to be yours and yours alone?”

– Blast Theory on I’d Hide You

 

I’d Hide You is a game developed by Blast Theory where players online direct 3 hosts on the ground to guide these hosts to catch each other on film. Each host has a camera that streams what they see and hear live, and the objective of the online players is to guide the host of their choice towards other hosts. When other hosts are caught on their live feed, online players press a button in order to catch these opponent hosts onscreen and score points. Online players are allowed to guide these hosts to ask pedestrians or passers by questions. Online players can also hop from one livestream to another to change the host that they are taking the perspective of.

 

IDLE is similar to I’d Hide You in how the game operates. Online players are allowed to hop from one livestream to another in order to gain different perspectives and achieve a goal, which, in IDLE’s case, is to find all the keys. It puts the online players’ thoughts and intents into fruition through the actions of the host, and thus the outcome of the game is decided by the online participants. IDLE attempts to bring its audience into it’s world, and, similar to I’d Hide You, wants the audience to be co-participants, bringing them into another world that is both immersive and entertaining.

 

An interesting aspect to note to this game is that you get to observe and be a part of each individual host’s character and personality. Marcos Dias, a lecturer of Media Studies in Maynooth University, Ireland, observed and posted in his personal blog that while following a host named Matt, he was given a tour of the city of Manchester along with vocal commentary. Matt, at one point during the game, sits down in a kebab shop and begins commenting on the shop’s choice of music. He also distributes cards with information regarding the game to other patrons of the shop.

 

Such is an interesting aspect of the game which involves the very personal input of the host himself. More often than not in mentioning DIWO art we tend to focus on how the audience can become co participants in this art form that we forget that the host himself is also a participant; the most important participant at that. Matt demonstrates very clearly how his personality and choices in the game can affect the viewing and playing experience of the audience. By stopping at the kebab shop to eat and commenting on the shop’s choice of music, the playing experience of the audience is very adversely altered; some players may not be too interested in such an encounter and may choose to switch to other hosts for a more competitive and exciting experience, while others who are interested in such an aspect of the game stay, observe, listen to and even chat with Matt regarding his stay in the store.

 

We originally intended to incorporate this personal aspect of DIWO into project IDLE as well. One of our ideas was to tell the participants that the host was getting tired and feeling faint due to the presence of smoke in the gameplay. He/she would then proceed to take a rest first, thus stalling the game and not allowing the game to progress. Such an idea was generated in order to add a more personal touch to the game so that the viewers understand that the host is struggling in the game and to add a more realistic touch to the suffering and difficulty of the situation presented to the protagonists of the game. This also adds an incentive for the online players to play more efficiently and have a sense of urgency in attempting to completing the game. However, due to the lack of time that the participants already faced in completing the game we decided not to go through with such a lengthy section of the project. Kai Ting did, however, at some point in the game, sit down on a chair claiming she was tired to the audience and basically refuse to do anything to allow for the game to progress. Such an input can be paralleled with Matt’s input in I’d Hide You.

 

Dias also mentions in his blog that two of the most interesting aspects of the game are the random screenshots they got from the streets of Manchester and the interactions between audiences of the game. He paralleled the gameplay to cruising along the streets in Grand Theft Auto, except that the gameplay wasn’t generated by algorithms.

 

Project IDLE is also similar to I’d Hide You in this aspect as audiences are able to interact and communicate with one another in the comments section. Some audiences began giving input that wasn’t relevant to the game in an attempt to communicate with the host herself. Alvin, a friend of ours who was a player in the game, commented that he was leaving now because he has a class to catch, and wishes good luck to the host. While irrelevant and not contributive to the progression of the game, it added a personal and playful touch to the experience for the audience. It made the game less robotic; if the comments were all only about the progression of the game and not so much of discussion or personal conversation, the level of interaction in the gameplay itself would feel very low and thus it loses some of the essence of DIWO art. Our inclusion of riddles in the clues themselves were also aimed at providing opportunities for the audience to discuss and interact with each other.

 

Screenshots of the game were also taken, and, while not as scenic as the streets of Manchester, also allowed for participants to be able to keep a permanent memory of such a game.

 

BLAST THEORY – UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU

“[Uncle Roy All Around You] investigates some of the social changes brought about by ubiquitous mobile devices, persistent access to a network and location aware technologies.”

– Blast Theory on Uncle Roy All Around You

Uncle Roy All Around You is an online based game which requires online players who are gathered at an office to control and direct several street players who are on the actual street to look for a person named Uncle Roy. They operate under a time limit and are allowed to communicate with other online players but not with the street players. When the online players do eventually find Uncle Roy, the end to the game takes a more meaningful twist that plays on the concept of online security.

IDLE borrows the aspect of cooperation and teamwork from Uncle Roy All Around You. Both games require online players to cooperate with one another to achieve a mutual goal. Both games also operate on the premise of having an online player and a street player. Together, these two players must gather sufficient information to be able to win the game.

 

An intended outcome of the game Uncle Roy All Around You, according to artist Steve Benford, was to make the audience feel uncomfortable. The audience are presented with a thought provoking question “Can you trust a stranger?”, and a lot of the gameplay in the subsequent parts of the game involve making the audience feel uncomfortable in order to challenge them in their beliefs of online security. Segments included things such as asking the player for their address.

A particular audience who emailed their experience of Uncle Roy All Around You documented that the experience was ‘paranoia inducing’, and that there was only a limited amount of guidance provided, which was just sufficient to allow the players to get where they were supposed to go in order to maximise the impact of the experience.

 

Similar to Uncle Roy All Around You, we attempted to induce paranoia and fear into the audience by the inclusion of feeling giddiness as the game time progressed. Such a feature was an attempt to allow the audience to feel urgency in completing the game.

 

Regarding the amount of guidance given to the audience, we also made the game easier to complete by expanding the range of their commands so that the search for the clues or the key itself was easier. For example, if the audience were to say “search in the jacket”, we would search every pocket of the jacket even though we originally intended for the audience to be more specific and wanted to prompt “which part of the jacket should I search?” This allowed for a smoother gameplay experience in order for us to be better able to point players in the right direction and avoid frustration.

 

Also similar to Uncle Roy All Around You, our gameplay also revolved around a fixed narrative, which was that the house was burning down and that we needed to find the keys to escape. The opposite of this can be observed in I’d Hide You, where a more combat, player vs player kind of gameplay can be observed. In that case, there is no backline narrative where the game is supposed to progress, and the game is simply based on a time or score limit.

 

Brainstorming for our game

When thinking of a location of our game we came to a roadstop due to the amount of locations that we deemed unavailable to us without having to break any rules; most commercial locations would not allow for us to be able to film our project in their workspaces due to the obstruction to their businesses that they would face. Furthermore, we required a large setting where there would be places we would be able to hide our clues and our keys for the players to find. These places would have to be simple enough so as to not appear overwhelming to the players, yet complex enough so that the players don’t find the game too easy or boring.

At the end of the day, we settled for IKEA with the most promising prospects for our project.

Looking for the location

Having settled with IKEA, we had to find 4 favourable rooms for the conduct of our experiment that preferably were not too far away from each other yet at the same time they had to be secluded enough so that we would not be spotted out by staff.

After our test run we concluded that our clues, being on white paper, were not visible enough for the players. Most of IKEA’s furniture revolved around a modern and sleek look that was mostly white and brown in colour, and white paper was too difficult to be spotted under these circumstances. We thus decided to change the clues and keys to yellow paper instead in hopes that it would be more visible for the players playing the game.

Also, commands given by players were incoherent and unclear. Due to the lack of rules that were in place, there was a lot of spam or redundant comments in the comment section that led to a very messy search. We thus decided to implement clearer rules and regulations and guidelines for how the game should be played in order for a better gameplay experience.

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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.