I tested my idea again using a similar set up to last time however this time I tested it with only one person. I sat on the floor with a pile of paper ready to hang up on the wall as we talked. I also had coloured paint this time to emphasise emotions, while this was handy at times it was also a little distracting as it is one more element to think about.
It started off awkward when I tried to steer the conversation to the topic I wanted to talk about (conversation/my idea).
However when I started allowing myself to just respond to Georgia’s conversation it flowed a lot better and become a two way dialogue despite me not speaking.
Some more personal things also came up as the conversation changed and evolved like it would in a normal conversion with friends.
In the end it felt like I was able to respond faster (despite not actually responding faster) as we were connected in a conversation.
Surprisingly, Georgia was only focused on our skype call while talking to me because
“I have to see what you are drawing as you are drawing it otherwise I wouldn’t understand it” – Georgia Lindsay
I felt that this test reinforced that my idea works but only in a one on one conversation. I would also like to have one long piece of paper next time so that it would better show how the conversation evolved. I also found it interesting how towards the end I would forget that I was even drawing and was communicating like i was speaking, it was only when I ran into something that I didn’t know how to convey visually that I remembered.
Nowadays people are always connected to their phone screens, they take their friends with them in their pocket and often ignore the world around them to talk to their friends on Facebook. My idea is to change this and interact with people in the third space while being totally immersed in the first space. Randall Packer (2014) defines the third space as a representation of
The fusion of the physical (first space) and the virtual (second space) into a third space that can be inhabited by remote users simultaneously or asynchronously.
It is a blurring of the first space and second space into an other and social space. However when people interact within the third space they often forget about the first. There have even been times when I have been sitting silently in a group of people where everyone is messaging the person next to them.
Most of the time, we encounter ourselves as immediately and unreflectively immersed in the world of our concerns (Heidegger’s Aesthetics),
much like how one forgets the pen when writing they also forget the physical interface when chatting on the internet. Because of this phenomemon, the moment when the artist Defi paints over Rosa Menkman’s Collapse of PAL(2011) sparked the beginning of an idea for my project.
This performance intrigued me as it breaks the screen, the viewer’s window into the third space, and forces the viewer back into the first space. You can see how much this upsets the children as they try to stop the artist. Rather than break my experience of the third space however, I wanted to embrace it and find a way to merge both the first and third spaces.
The third space collapses space and time allowing people toexist in multiple spaces at once. In Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s A Hole in Spacethe participants interacted with one another seemingly like passing by one another on the street despite being 3000 miles away. These people existed both in Los Angeles and New York simultaneously. Similarly in Annie Abrahams’ The Big Kiss (2007) while she exists physically alone in her house, she is joined with a partner in the third space and, through the screen, in the physical space at the gallery.
Despite already being able to exist in multiple spaces at once through the third space, I wanted to take this idea further by removing myself from the third space while still being able to interact with it, blurring the lines between the first and third spaces. To test this idea I set up a little space where I could listen to a friend on skype(third space) but only reply by drawing on the paper(first space).
This effectively turns the paper into an interface through which I can interact in the third space. The more traditional media of ink on paper is significant as it expresses emotions. When receiving a handwritten letter you can feel the emotions behind it through the way the strokes are made. I could also extend this by using my hands and body to draw/write/finger-paint on the paper which would give a more personal connection and also immerse me more in the first space through my whole body moving.
In the end I found myself resorting to text language as it was faster to write. Perhaps I could allow myself to speak during the skype call but show my emotional responses through the first space. I would use coloured paint and emoticons (referencing the way of showing emotion on social media) to show my emotions and reactions to the conversation. To enhance this effect I could also change my voice so you couldn’t hear emotion.
=)
(>_<)
(T＿T)
o(^▽^)o
(￣□￣;)!!
(>^_^)><(^o^<)
Not being able to see my face or read emotion from my voice makes it uncertain if I am being honest about my emotions (like typing ‘lol’ without actually laughing). This also reflects my ideas about what is real on the internet expressed in my first micro-project.
I hope that my work serves as a conversation to how people are investing themselves too much in the third space and that we need to find ways too immerse ourselves once again in the first space while still keeping connections in the third space.
For Life Sharing we turned our private lives into a public artwork – Eva and Franco Mattes
Life Sharing (2000-03) is a work by Eva and Franco Mattes where they opened the contents of their computers to the internet for people to share, look at and download anything and everything including the system itself.
Life sharing is about exploring ideas of public vs private and also transparency and peer to peer sharing. Created before social media was a thing, Life Sharing focuses on sharing. Unlike social media where sharing reinforces a projection (honest or not) of the user’s self, life sharing is about transparency where everything on their personal computer is accessible including personal emails.
I found this disparity intriguing, how life sharing could be open despite removal of the artists themselves (names were also altered on emails). Their first space selves were private whereas their third space self was laid bare for all to see.
I tested out my idea to have myself in the physical space while interacting with people in the third space. This essentially makes the paper a interface for me.
I found this to be very difficult to execute. There is a large time difference for me to write or draw a response rather than speak it which often killed the conversation and I would have to start again on a different topic. I also found it interesting that I ended up using internet slang while writing just to speed up the process.
After a 5 minutes my 3 friends (from different cities and countries) started to have their own converstaions and I was left just listening as I couldn’t respond fast enough. Lag in 1st space?
After this experiment I have been thinking of ways I could improve it. Maybe I could follow the directions of the viewers rather than responding to questions, or playing a game like pictionary or a board game.
