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).
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.
