Angry Women and their Entanglement

Annie Abraham’s Angry Women is a piece hosted on webcam. The webcam acts as a facilitator for the women’s anger. The purpose of this artwork is to make a stand on female anger through angry discussions on the internet. Five performances were carried out with a full womans panel. Another had only men and the other two mixed with female. They also carried out private webcam meetings to reflect on and analyse the performance.

“We all have one subject, in fact. Mine is communication and the difficulty to communicate at all. Everything I do is around that.”

– Annie Abrahams

By using anger as a premise for this performance, remote communication that is through webcam becomes a method of disentanglement for the grievances of the participants.

 “In the beginning I had difficulties accepting these videoarchives because I saw how much they depended on our hazardous trying to interact, to be present in this universe of alone togetherness. Besides I didn’t like my own presence. As in other web performances I felt trapped and revealed myself not as I would have liked to be revealed.”

– Annie Abrahams

Annie believes that communicating in a grid works on the concept of “No Exit”. Having to be present in that small digital space, being isolated in togetherness gives her the sense of entrapment. I find this quite interesting because the act of talking through grievance in this artwork seems like a liberating concept.

“She clearly understands the inherent issues of bandwidth, distance, separation, and even alienation that occurs online. In fact, in many ways she embraces these issues and incorporates them into the vocabulary of her work.”

– Randall Packer on Annie Abrahams

The idea of alienation occurring as a result of bandwidth, disruption when communicating through the third space, is one that is prevalent yet easily overlooked by many – myself included. Through this concept of disruption and bandwidth, we may be able to explore the disentanglement of our real world problems within our curated utopia.

Facebook and Reality

Many of our Facebook actions are like this. They might seem to mean nothing, and yet be taken to mean something. They might seem to mean something, and in fact mean something else

A Reply to facebook Critics
D.E. Wittkower

Facebook has almost become the holy grail in which we document our lives. We are documenting our reality through posts comprising of textual commentary, photographs – sometimes augmented – and all things framed to our liking. By this theory, by the logic of such an act, our Facebook personas can show our reality. But how realistic is this framed reality? Do our posts really mean anything?

My personal belief is slanted towards the idea that our Facebook personas are curations of our lives. Though there have been many talks of the falseness in such propagated realities, I believe there is a reality in curation. Much like an exhibition, these posts are framed and created with personal intention, our ideal representation. These posts are there for a reason.

As the Existentialists argued, my life-choices mean something to me, in large part, because I have chosen them as my own. And so too, my Facebook means something to me, in large part, because I have shared certain kinds of links, taken certain quizzes, and played certain games—and because my friends (who I have chosen) themselves have chosen to do and share what they have chosen to do and share. And I don’t mean this just in the trivial sense that, of course, each of our Feeds are made up of a unique set of different user-generated content.

A Reply to facebook Critics
D.E. Wittkower

How far can we push this representation of our reality? What if we do not frame our posts, but come transparent with the fine details of our lives?

This can be explored in Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience 2.0 (2003). In this work of self-surveillance, Elahi publishes his every move online. This act came about he was detained by authorities during one of his travels by bias of his ethnicity, and told that he was going to be ‘watched very closely’. Thus, he began watching himself very closely.

On his website, we see detailed timestamps and unquestionably raw photographs of everyday acts such as toilet trips, uninteresting meals and grocery shopping. There is even a live feed of his exact location.

Elahi uses this extremity of a public transparency rather ironically. He believes that he could do a better job than anyone to execute surveillance on himself through means of such publication. However, by framing his life in such an extreme manner, putting out data of his every move as curated online, he creates a camouflage. It is an unquestionable data that forms a camouflage of reality. The amount of dedication, sacrifice and effort he has put into this work, even giving up a large chunk of his life, is captivating and powerful as a statement and an anti-art.

Media Burn and the Art of Destruction

Ant Farm, an avant garde video arts group founded in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Hall, is now a highly acknowledged collective of creatives that embrace the art of destruction (according to Patricia Mellencamp in her Journal of Film and Video).

EAI, Media Burn (https://www.eai.org/titles/media-burn)

One of the collective’s destructive artworks titled Media Burn (1975) is a performance that touches on the representative nature of the media. The artwork consists of crashing a “Phantom Dream Car” (a modified convertible) through a pyramid of televisions.

Doug Hall plays John F. Kennedy in this piece, whereby he touched on the flaws of media in society: ‘What has gone wrong with America is not a random visitation of fate. It is the result of forces that have assumed control of the American system…These forces are: militarism, monopoly, and the mass media…Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information… And who can deny that we are nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? And not a few of us are frustrated by this addiction. Now I ask you, my fellow Americans: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?’

This is relevant to the notions of the hypodermic needle theory in the mass media, a controversial topic left helpless for decades. The ability of the media to inject ideas in to the viewer’s head, its ability to make ideas portrayed seem like the truth is one concept that is played out in this piece.

Chip Lord mentioned in an interview with Randall Packer that the televised image of John F. Kennedy as the first televised tragedy was one of impact and epiphany, since it was one of the first televised image of the bad side of reality. This inspired his work and heavy sentiments towards this side of the media. The destruction of the televisions is acts as a kind of anti-art, a protest. The destruction of a concept can be seen as a rebellious statement, and could perhaps be one of the defining characteristics in such a piece. It is a powerful way to show the anti motion against the lack of media literacy.

 

Do It With Others and Experimental Interaction

Do It With Others (DIWO) is a variation on Do It Yourself (DIY) where activity is now shared through participatory media.

In this approach, peers connect and collaborate, creating their own structures, using either digital networks or shared physical environments, making an art that is both made and distributed across a network.

Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood, Ruth Cathlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield

DIWO is practiced in Furtherfield, where the focus is now drawn on collaborative effort through emerging social technologies. In art, the role of the artist and the spectator is blurred. Those who come as audience usually play a part in influencing the outcome of the artwork, while the artist lift his own directive authority on the piece. A commonly known example of this is Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, whereby Yoko stays completely still and allows the audience member to curate how her clothes are cut.

In this Experimental Interaction module, we explore the concept of DIWO through micro-projects.

Our fourth micro-project titled “The Collective Body” is a feed of our body parts combined on a Flickr group to create what is a metaphysically diversified body. The technology of a Flickr group feed enables us to each contribute to the composition of this piece through our personalised frames and augmentations on our photos.

Another micro-project that works on DIWO is our first micro-project, whereby we stream on Facebook Live concurrently as we walk through our school. The streams are the aggregated onto a wall in a grid. The collaborative stream of events creates a metaphysical collage of space and time, moments we experienced together.

DIWO means exploring the potential to share visions, resources and agency, through collaboration and negotiation, across physical and virtual networks – maintaining a critical consciousness and hopefully, somehow having a decent life at the same time…

Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood, Ruth Cathlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield

DIWO plays an integral part in interactive art since the media is largely dependant on audience activity and collaborative effort. An artwork is deemed interactive when the audience can expect to participate and even play a part in the outcome of the artwork. It could even be said that art is not interactive without DIWO.

DIWO embodies ability to aggregate work in collaborative curation, allowing any person to create art, and this has revolutionised our contemporary art scene.

A Collaborative New Media: The World’s Longest Sentence

The World’s Longest Sentence is an interactive art piece that is enabled by the collaborative contributions of the audience through a website. The site instructs them to “continue the sentence” by submitting material of varying type – including text, image, video and sound.

The audience member is unaware of what precedes in the sentence. I contributed by submitting the phrase “to continue the sentence”. This phrase will then be published at the back of the running sentence on the website.

Generated is a long running, haphazard sentence of all languages and slang. Oddly enough, we are able to make sense of the different fragments contributed, and the stark coincidence in some pieces is compelling to watch.

Narrativity takes on new meaning and form in networked practices, through collaborative, many-tomany systems of writing, media making, and other forms of online expression. In connection with open source thinking, the collective narrative is a sharing and open exchange of conversation, ideas, information, and media that leads to a synthesis of voices: forming a common thread among peers.

Randall Packer, Open Source Studio

The piece is a social media that synthesises the communicative language and thought of a multitude of audiences, creating what seems to be a collage of a narrative. By collapsing our differences as such, and enabling our sentence to tally, the artist has put forth an incessant stream augmented reality; a third space whereby our differentiated thoughts are able to tell the same story. In one read, we are able to experience the narrative from a plethora of physical angles and make sense of them in a metaphysical space of cognition.

The possibilities of peer-to-peer authoring of the collective narrative is now native to our writing tools, such as Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and WordPress, in which multiple authors can coauthor and collaborate on writing projects, often in real time. This dramatically alters the act of writing and narrative, from the singular activity of a very personal form of individual expression, to a collective activity that is highly collaborative: all publishable instantaneously to a global audience.

Randall Packer, Open Source Studio

Much like collaborative online systems such as Google Drive and Google Docs, The World’s Longest Sentence allows for multiple users to co-author a narrative. What differentiates it from such softwares is it’s provision of instruction to allow for live collaboration on a much larger scale. The instructions narrow function as facilitators for the users to move in the same direction when participating in this extensive narrative.

Grand Theft Avatar – As a Third Space

The Third Space has an ability to collapse space and time through a “fragmented and augmented perception of reality”, according to Randall Packer.

We are connected to each other within this space, despite factors of reality that may hinder this connection. An example of such a network is Grand Theft Avatar — a live interactive performance art by Second Front.

In this piece, the participants of Second Front take up pseudo identities and deploy to rob a bank to free the virtual currency of “Linden Dollars”.

The third space represents the fusion of the physical (first space) and the remote (second space) into a third space that can be inhabited by remote users simultaneously or asynchronously.

Randall Packer

Grand Theft Avatar deploys a simultaneous use of the third space, collapsing the notions of reality through allowing such a scene to take place virtually/in a metaphysical space while the subjects are controlled live by actual beings.

It showcases how participants would interact with other participants in real life, however these behaviours are only actualised in a virtual space. This phenomenon rids the scenario of cause and consequence, creating a hole in this staged reality.

The third space is perhaps akin to the fourth dimension, a hyperspace where spatial trajectories have no boundaries, where temporal relations are amorphous, where wormholes reveal pathways that are instantaneous and geographically dispersed.

Randall Packer

The nature of Grand Theft Auto is also said to allow it’s players to experience thrill through reckless behaviours that harbour serious consequences in real life.

It could then be said that in this third space, actual beings can experience a different and impossible version of reality through this media. This quality brings a certain superior level of flexibility to the third space.

From Proprietary to Open Source: Our Expanded Studio Space

The Open Source model is one that gives everybody the right to be a content creator.

Before the advent of Open Source, the Proprietary media had limited our practice to our a selective pool of message senders, particularly those who were practiced media. Open Source gave anyone who had access to this system an opportunity to publish their messages through this media.

The concept of the open source studio finds its greatest potential in the collaborative practices among peer groups that share goals, methods, ideologies, and aspirations. When artists and other creative practitioners aggregate their work (do it with others), it Fig5 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole-In-Space: A Public Communications Sculpture, 1980. (Image courtesy of pacificstandardtime.org.) IEEE Potentials November/December 2015 n 37 constitutes a form of cultural production that is collective in nature, whether it be a work of art, creative dialogue, or social interaction with the public. The Internet and social media have catalyzed this capability by providing multiple distribution channels for discourse and shared production.

– Packer R, Open Source Studio

Open source also means that users can interact with sources, therefore making it a space for DIWO (Do It With Others), which is a movement that encourages a collaborative practice.

Another difference between the proprietary and open source model is it’s directional ability as a means of communication. Proprietary is a unilateral communication model, whereby open source’s bilateral ability can allow for  a review of the message. In a sense, the source can be influenced in real time by multiple users, providing it with a different value.

…fast, efficient, and dependable communication, guided by protocols both social and digital (a process Benkler calls “integration”, can generate brilliant and powerful tools and expressions

Vaidhyanathan S, Open Source as Culture-Culture as Open Source

This model also changed the market by providing non-commercial, non-copyrighted materials to the public, putting a question mark in people’s heads. This efficient means of communication sped up the development of many industries as the pool of accessible information had greatly increased, and the speed at which such knowledge could me acquired had also improved a fair bit.

This Urban Gymnasium is an installation that invites it’s audience to use household materials in actual gym culture. The art is not just in the physical setup but is also defined by the audience’s performance.

As artists, we are also able to leverage on this system by allowing our audiences to interact with or even influence the outcome of our works. This act of DIWO is phenomenal because it allows our audiences to share the experience of art making with us.