The Telematic Dinner Party, hosted on March 22nd, 2015, was just like any other regular dinner party, but it was held via Adobe Connect in the 3rd space. It included the same elements as any old dinner party: different arrival times of the guests, soft jazz music playing in the background, a toast, three different courses, chatter, jokes, and the final goodbye. However, as it took place in the virtual world, it also included some elements from the 3rd space: lag, connection drop-outs, and other technical difficulties. The entire dinner party lasted one hour, but has been condensed into five minutes for the purpose of this project.
The Telematic Dinner Party was a very sentimental moment for me. My roommates and I do everything together. The five of us will cram into our small student kitchen in picturesque Kingston, Ontario to make five separate meals together, just so that we can have a collective dinner. We’ll sit around the living room and chat, and we’ll even crawl into bed together to watch the newest episode of our favourite show. After not seeing them for 4 months, I’m going into serious withdrawal. My newest favourite family was separated by thousands of miles, with each of us in different corners of the world: Canada, Singapore, England, and Hong Kong. But I guess what they say is true: love conquers all, doesn’t it?
Skype and FaceTime made regular appearances in our constant conversations, but it wasn’t the same having this one-on-one interaction as it used to be with the five of us together. When our class began having classes on Adobe Connect, I started to understand how the barriers of distance can be broken in such a large virtual interaction.
Throughout this class of Media and Performance, we have studied and analyzed the Internet and our interactions within what is called the third space. In a world where my roommates cannot get together in the 1st space (where I am) or the 2nd space (where they are), we have no choice but to create this 3rd space in the virtual world. We’d set up Skype dates so that we could catch each other up on the happenings in our lives, but it wasn’t quite the same as the 5 of us sitting around at home in Kingston. The 3rd space was necessary to collapses the 5 different spaces that had been created by our distance to invent this collective space for our connection. So that is where the birth of the Telematic Dinner Party came from: the need for a reuniting of 5 girls who were always meant to be best friends.
But then the question arose: would this Telematic Dinner Party be the same as having a “family dinner” in the 1st space? Would the obvious presence of physical separation and a computer connection diminish the interaction between us? There was only one way to find out, and find out we did.
As you can see from this video, the presence of a computer was irrelevant to the connection that we shared. It brought us back to the days of sitting in our living room to share a meal, watch a movie, or just hang out and chat. We were able to truly connect, interact and have intimate conversations despite a great amount of physical distance, some technical difficulties and a conversation taking place in the 3rd space. The internet did not take away from our intimate dinner party. The conversations that you have just watched were unfiltered, we all spoke freely. Although I was unable to show the entire hour long party, I have showed you the special moments, where we catch up, fill each other in, make jokes, and talk about how much we miss each other. A dinner party in the 1st world is unfiltered and can have some profanities, so why can’t a dinner party in the 3rd space have that too?
We first saw an example of the shattering of the barriers of physical distance in Kit Galloway’s and Sherri Rabinowitz’s A Hole-In-Space. When those individuals from New York and Los Angeles were able to connect despite their grand distance, we saw how intimacy and a great connection can overcome physical separation. The third space has allowed such progress among human communication in this digital age and it has allowed my roommates and I to reconnect and enjoy the company that we take for granted in the real world
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This project was a performance. Although all of the speech and conversation that you have witnessed was all natural and required no prompt, the mere knowledge of the presence of the camera makes it a performance. As seen, my roommates were taking photos of this event to document it, they were fixing their hair and constantly looking at themselves in the screen to check their appearance. Funny jokes were made, and at first, some things were held back until everyone eased into the comfort of this dinner party. Each member began to suspend their disbelief as they ignored the ever present physical distance and separation between us to believe that we were together again in our living room and sharing a meal. At one point, without any prompt whatsoever, Holly begins to shatter the concept of distance (3:10) and partake in the “collective embrace” just as we had experimented with in class on Adobe Connect.
The Telematic Dinner Party was, at least in my eyes, a success. Not only was I able to partake in an exciting experiment in the third space, but I was able to connect with people that I really love and have missed dearly. Physical distance has become something that is very easily overcome with the use of the virtual world and the 3rd space.
The Telematic Dinner Party Video can be seen below:
