Groupmates: Jing Yi, Felicia, Yuol Mae, Me (Qistina)
For our final, we had numerous ideas but could not come up with a concrete good one. Either way, it is important to show the research and ideas we had throughout, that leads us to our main idea. That way you can see our progress! The link below is the document to our initial ideas (not the main one):
From there, you can see the brainstorming that eventually led us to come up with a proper game idea: A Lost Dementia Person in IKEA. The link below will lead you to the important processes noted down in the making of our interactive game – how we included DIWO and the Third Space as well.
REFLECTION: After going through everything in the above, there were definitely some setbacks and challenges in the process of the game. When we tried doing the trial run first, we realised that we are confused with the posts Yuolmae (the Lost Dementia Person in this game) posted on the functions of Instagram (Instagram Story and Posts). This was a huge problem because as players on that trial run day, we did not understand how to even play it. The goal wasn’t met and we were stuck. We then realised that it was because we did not have proper instructions, restrictions and purpose in our game.
Another challenge was on the real game day. This was because somehow Yuolmae wasn’t at a hiding spot and roamed around close to where she gave her clues at, which made it easier for the players to find her when it was not even past half an hour. So maybe we should have made it more challenging. But overall, I really loved this Final Project and what we have come up with for it. It’s a new experience, a good one with cooperative teammates, and I definitely learn something too along the way. Think big, and really put yourself in the game like as if you are the player. Or even the missing person.
And last but not least, here is the link to our short video of the game. Enjoy.
On the 29th to 31st March, the Symposium was held using the third space network to have a more inclusive and global gathering, with collaborative network performance performed live. Here below is the link to my Hyperessay.
Reflection: After watching and sitting through the Symposium, I realise how the third space really brings about a new form of meaning and intimacy. This is highlighted in my essay above. And I start to appreciate the network, even more, seeing that it could bring about evolvement in art. This experience was different and definitely gave me a lot to think about.
When we were asked to do this project, to mimic our favourite artist’s (singers, painters, actors etc) persona, I knew for sure who I wanted to be.
Melanie Martinez.
She is an American singer who became famous because of her appearance on The Voice. She has this crazy, sad, childish persona and even dressed as one in all her music videos such as Pity Party, Dollhouse, Cry Baby, Pacify Her and more.
Bits and pieces of her persona in the music video are shown in her actions such as playing with dolls, cracking their head, playing with soft toys and cutting them when she’s upset, being upset at random timing, screaming, laughing and crying. I’m in love with her music videos because her acting and emotions makes her persona so real in them. And because of that persona she portrays, she manages to bring out the meaning behind her music videos very well.
So what I did to mimic her was to dress up close to her: bright-coloured dress, piggy-tailed hairstyle that’s usually associated with some kiddy style, red lips make-up because she always has dark coloured or bright coloured full on lipstick on her lips. I decided to do fake freckles on my face too using eyeliner.
Then i did the setting in my room, on the bed with some of me and my sister’s soft toys and a knife to show how crazy I am to play with something so dangerous that can cut, along with the soft toys and myself (who can bleed).
In the ‘art of destruction’ project, we had to incorporate bits of elements from glitch art and the idea of destruction – both as an act to portray the artistic expression.
Our group (Fizah, Naomi, Azizah and me), did a stop-motion video of a living flower “decaying” by having us each destroying it. We took pictures of the whole process and compile them in a video. First, we plucked the flower out from the other plants. Then we cut the flower petals, tried to burn it, stabbed it with a penknife and stepping on it. We further emphasised the idea of ‘deteriorating one’s life’ by coming up with a poem with words of aggravation towards the flower, (what you heard in the video) to go alongside the process of it.
The fact that it is a living thing, it just emphasises on the “decaying” and deteriorating in it’s original quality which here is, the quality of it’s life (that itself is an art form of nature). And that destruction process in the video, is a new quality of an artwork. Similarly for the ending, where the quality of it is it’s death.
But during the process of destroying it, the problem we faced was to actually make it look like it decayed. Due to the fact that the destruction process seemed forced as we gave ourselves instructions on what to do to it, some parts was a failure because
1) we couldn’t get the flower to burn no matter how many times we tried due to the wind blowing the other direction
2) stabbing it with a penknife was quite stupid considering there’s not really much effect seen from that act of destruction.
Yet we still put in whatever pictures we had into the video, which was what made the artwork inconsistent – we had different process pictures of destruction that did not add up with the nice flow of our poem spoken. Also, we did not have the time to clear out the background noises when we were citing the poem. However, instead of editing the background noises out, we let it be the way it was. Even with the inconsistency of the other things, we embraced it and let it be part of our artwork.
The mess in the process is like a glitch, parallel to the process of the destruction of the flower. Everything in this is what I call an ‘Art of Destruction’. Both literally (what we did to the flower) and not literally (the mess in the process).
In Randall Packer’s interview with Chip Lord, by “examining the impact of mass media in American culture” Ant Farm stages an explosive collision of two of America’s most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. This artwork (performance) called Media Burn embraces the idea of destruction as well to portray their criticism towards the American’s obsession with media.
In Randall Packer’s conversation with Jon Gates “Hyperallergic”, Gates said that “But from a dirty new media perspective, what you might want to be doing is “rebugging,”…..instead of debugging and refining those errors and glitches and noise…. “and pushing different aspects of the machine worlds to see their thresholds, and experiment, and play”. This is what we are trying to do: we experiment and now it is time to leave that ‘noise’ in our work be, instead of taking it out like we usually do in our process towards a ‘good artwork’ and instead allow it to be part of our artwork itself – an art of destruction.
Idea: Destroying the original quality of a living thing – seeing it’s life deteriorate. Aside from using physical sharp objects, we also used words of aggravation towards the flower, as a way to slowly kill it’s ‘soul’. But also seeing the mess in the video process (the background noise in our recording, the pictures in the end that don’t fit to the flow of the poem constructed) as an error embraced, part of the whole art of destruction.
Glitch is like an error to me, a sort of noise that deconstruct an image and disruption of voices. But despite the negative effect the ‘noise’ glitch is associated with, it “also powers that force the reader to move away from the traditional discourse around the technology, and to open it up.”
This way we could make art through glitch like we did in the above. It changes the way we create art through technology and like what Rosa Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto said,“It can be a source for new patterns, anti-patterns and new possibilities that often exist on the border or membrane. ” I see it as mixing machine language and human language, thus forming an experimental new media art.
Before diving into our Micro-Project 3, we were given readings such as Maria Chatzichristodoulou’s “Cyber-performance” and “The Third Space” by Randall Packer to give ourselves a head-start. But after making this micro-project, I had a clearer view of what Third Space really means.
The third space is a virtual platform that’s created where there is “a fluid matrix of potentiality and realizable connections to the most far-reaching remoteness”. The other person may not be physically present with the artist, but through technology it “collapses boundaries in the third space“, transporting the person’s presence next to the artist.
What Yuolmae and I did to create intimacy in a third space is to repeat the motif of the bed, which was inspired by Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992) artwork where “The ability to exist outside of the users own space and time is created by an alarmingly real sense of touch that is enhanced by the context of the bed”.
The idea of ‘bed’ – personal, in our unarmed state. And let’s say we are sharing the bed then it is something up close and personal between the artist and the other. There is that deep sense of intimacy, despite actually being so far apart in reality. To enhance that closeness, we talked about daily life stuff – what we did, whether we’ve eaten, whether we have done our home works; like as if she’s my roomie/best friend in the same room.
In that moment, we are not only connected through livestream but somewhat skin to skin, hair strands “connected to each other”, we are “sharing” the earpiece and listening to the song I was listening to. We share the same food or somewhat the same in a bowl and pass it back to each other like as if Yuolmae was just right next to me. This was how we formed the “third body”.
But in contrary to this, we could not entirely connect through all 5 senses we have as a human – to experience a full on closeness. Yes we can hear, we can see and communicate with each other, but we can’t really touch and feel the other through this third space. It’s weird I guess because the viewers watching us could probably sense the closeness and intimacy.
This reminds me of the movie “Her”
Theodore and the operating system, Samantha.
where this newly-divorced man gets close to the a new operating system which reportedly develops into an intuitive and unique entity in its own right. She functions as a operating system but like a person, she can accompany him everywhere he goes and be his friend but without having a body like a human does, yet both manages to fall in love without experiencing all 5 solid senses.
That just shows the intimacy this third space could really create and like what Randall Packer stated, “The third space has become the new order of what it means to be human.” – that couldn’t be any more right.
(Making this my first post back on OSS and in the new year, HELLO 2018! HELLO SEM 2!)
For the previous two lessons on Experimental Interaction, we had to read Marc Garrett’s Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) article and discussed it as a class. In the following lesson we were given our Micro-Project 2: Crowd-sourced Artwork with our specific groups. In my group, which includes Jing Yi, Azizah and me, we did a crowd-source project by using the Instagram app and it’s “POLL” function under Instagram Story.
In this project, we did a short poll game where two people (me and Azizah) does the same actions but compete each other on who does it better and the judgement is based on the online public. Jing Yi records us and immediately put it up on Instagram ‘story’ function to show it to the audience on Instagram.
Since we only had a short period of time to do this mini project/game, we decided to limit it to 4 polls only and time ourselves to 3 minutes to collect the number of votes to see who wins. This took place in our school outside class so we can have it at an open space where not only our classmates could see our actions, but others in school too. It’s interesting to get people looking at you and questioning what you are doing, because it means they are curious about the idea behind it and wants to engage in it.
Our first Instagram story is a post on the short instructions to our mini poll game.
Immediately after posting the videos of what we do, in real time, Jing Yi then upload another post where the voting takes place. The viewers of our Instagram story vote based on the questions on these posts pertaining to the actions we do. We made it open to Instagram users and also made our classmates follow one of our group mates account to follow our Instagram story for this poll game. This is so that they can participate too. So for example, we will ask questions like the ones in the pictures below and they will simply click 1 of the 2 options:
And whoever has more votes, wins for that particular round (the post).
It’s simple but it’s interactive. And that’s the point of it. We used a popular social media platform as a way to reach out to the crowd online for their opinion. We allow everyone on Instagram to take part in the game as they, who watches, are the ones who gets to choose who wins in each question asked in each post. They play a huge part in getting the game going. In a way, we are doing crowd-sourcing.
One of our inspirations was from the open-source artist like Craig D. Giffen and his “Human Clock”, where he allows people all over the world to submit their picture of numbers found on any places, that corresponds to the current timing.
Sent pictures of the current timing numbers from people all over the world.
The site will automatically refresh itself after a minute has gone by and the same thing happens! It’s a brilliant idea of reaching out to the public as it allows more creativity to tell the time, and it connects with them all to engage in this “Human Clock”.
The same goes for art and I want to relate this back to the Marc Garrett’s DIWO article because yes, there is “a new form of participatory art emerging, in which artists engage with communities and their concerns.” With the elements of DIWO, the ecological, social and the networks we use, it allows this kind of autonomous communication in many media (such as Instagram, Facebook, Béhance etc). And that’s what we did using Instagram. But before thinking of this poll game that includes sourcing from others outside, it is obvious that we had to think of the public because “critically engaged activities were thought as an essential nourishment not only for ‘individual’ artists but ALSO as an effective form of artistic collaboration with others”.
This crowd-source based artwork is a departure from traditional art making by a single artist, simply because we see that nowadays traditional art has become more self-referential and divorced from social life, whereas artworks sourcing from everyone else has helped my group-mates and I to thrive together and come up with a more collaborative form of art. It engages everyone to come together in this game, this artwork we made in a short span of time.
At the same time, unlike traditional proprietary modes of artistic creation and production, by initiating projects together we get to come up with creative ideas faster by sharing these different ideas and in the end still come up with an artwork that includes everyone else. There’s a “mass diffusion of human intellect through interaction”. Those traditional art creates a divide with all the “market-led appropriation” in it’s creation and production. However, through peer-to-peer interaction (DIWO), we allow ourselves to break away from the norm and do not conform to strategies. It is more open – it turns our attention as “creators, viewers and participants to connectedness and free interplay between (human and non-human) entities and conditions.”.
