Research Critique: A Hole in Space

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s A Hole in Space is hailed as the mother of all video chats. They connected a live audience from Los Angeles to a live audience in New York through life sized screens which feed through to each other using satellites.

 

I found this fascinating as it shows how the virtual space allows users to transcend human limits of space and time as

each screen became a window onto the other location. -Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds.)

The viewers and participants interacted with one another seemingly like passing by one another on the street despite being 3000 miles away. After the initial discovery people went to phone booths to call friends and family telling them to meet on the other side (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/audio/aop_tour_413). Media also spread the word and by the next day organised meet ups between families who hadn’t seen each other in over 20 years, marriage proposals were made and strangers acted spontaneously with one another as

a virtual space creates social situations without traditional rules of ettiquate…virtual space diminishes our fears of interaction.- Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds.))

 

The collaborative nature of this piece is also very interesting as the artists acted wholly as facilitators rather than performers. They created a social space where people were left to themselves to interact and communicate becoming the performers. The piece could only have been achieved through the collaboration between artist and performer/pedestrian and between the pedestrians themselves through their spontaneous interaction and organised meet ups.

We wanted to create new kinds of community commons to break away from the tyranny of the broadcast and traditional media and we just wanted to create a social space and turn it on and then let people acculturate it by owning it with their imaginations and if they could then occupy this new space and begin to see how they could use it then they would become, in their imaginations, the architects of a new future, they might begin to define what they want as an information environment rather than be consumers of it. -Kit Galloway (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/audio/aop_tour_413)

 

Blog Narrative – RC Fashion

To wear an orange vest and a road cone on your head is not what one would usually say is normal, let in the least attractive. Yet yet it at one point people from all around New Zealand dressed in this way to show support for those affected by the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. I snapped these two year 13 boys casually wearing this fashion around my high school back in 2012 when the trend first started.

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On 4 September 2010 a 7.1 magnitude quake hit Christchurch damaging many buildings, then on the 22 February 2011 a 6.3 magnitude quake hit which destroyed buildings and killed 185 people. After this the majority of the central business district had to be demolished and many buildings and areas of land were found to be unsafe, meaning there were road cones and more road cones everywhere. At first the trend started as a comical response to the ever growing population of road cones in Christchurch but it was picked up on by students as a way to show support for the community.

Other ways people showed their united spirit was through placing flowers in road cones and creating little community spaces in the spaces left where buildings had been demolished such as this  road cone chess set.

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Even my flatmate Georgia got in on the action, posing in a row with the road cones as part of an art piece after the more recent (2013) earthquakes in Wellington.

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As a bonus I also found a short documentary on the road cone population in Christchurch:

Open Source System

How might the open source system of sharing and collective narrative be a creative inspiration and approach for artists? 

The open source system is a

quasi-utopian form of peer production that inspires transparency, collaboration, collective processes, non-proprietary methods of production and distribution, and a commitment to the creative process as a social exchange”.- Randall Packer

It challenges the current dominant capitalist society by allowing artists to experiment, innovate, appropriate and collaborate within something like a reservoir of creative genius. Despite this idealism (or maybe because of it) projects like Linux have expanded and thrived, becoming a rival to commercial giants, Microsoft and Apple. This could only be possible through the collaboration of many people who all held the same ideas of working together to improve society and rebel against the monopoly of products and information.

Personally, I find collaborative modes of working to be extremely rewarding, allowing me to draw on other people’s expertise, ideas and experience to shape a project in a way that wouldn’t have been possible by myself. With the internet we are able to connect more people with more people. It is a space in which collaborative ways of working thrive and your work can reach a larger audience much faster without worrying about censorship and professional gallery curation. However in a capitalist society, it is easy for your work to be exploited without copyrights and intellectual property, but with them the piece is no longer open and collaborative. Creative Commons is a compromise between open source and commercialization. It allows the contributor to establish how their work can be used and stipulate whether it can be used for free even for commercial practices or not. This allows the artist to express creative freedom without supporting commercialization of art and share their own work to inspire others’.