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)

 

Published by

Paige

I'm supposed to write something funny here but...

One thought on “Research Critique: A Hole in Space”

  1. I think this was awesome for its time – 1980s! But the best part of this is the emotions displayed from the participants. The flow of emotions and their reaction was amazing to watch. It truly gave hope for the future with this as the spark!

Leave a Reply