Project Hyperessay #1: Concept

The elaborate, premeditated death of Tania Tay on online (social) media

Overview
The performer Tania Tay would go through elaborate funerary rituals, albeit abstractly. She first builds a mini tentage, chants, dons on white clothing, and does superficial, ridiculous and elaborate walking rituals. Lastly, she sets up her final resting place, and lies down.

While the entire performance carries on, the screen slowly glitches. At the end of the performance, the glitch would be horribly glitched until only a slight semblance of the form can be seen.

Objectives
To celebrate, flamboyantly, the ceasing of Tania Tay’s online identity. It exposes the temporality of the constructed presence within the artificial third space, and deconstructs the artificial, artificially.

Interactive Component
The project having a set, definite ending (the death) that viewers are unable to disrupt or stop. However, viewers are still able to input their comments via the fb live comments, which would be read by the performer and acknowledged, but callously discarded as she continues on her death rampage. The project is a strong statement of the artificiality, and wishes to impact it on the viewer.

Technicalities
Two computers/screens would be involved.

The first screen would show the captured footage, but will further process it within max msp for the glitch to occur. The second screen will capture the entire processed footage from the first screen. The camera will be affixed to the performer, adopting a first person point of view shot.

Influences
1. Glitch

Glitch, as interpreted by Rosa Menkman as,

…a (actual and/or simulated) break from an expected or conventional flow of information or meaning within (digital) communication systems that results in a perceived accident or error.
– Rosa Menkman in The Glitch Moment(um), (2011)

Glitch is essentially, deconstruction. Deconstruction from the expected flow, which I felt was a suitable metaphor for death: the sudden break in living; the startling lack of continuity. After death, the body breaks down, a decade of living and progress unraveled. I find it noteworthy to continue on this idea of deconstruction, and felt that glitching the broadcast from start to the end finalises in the poetic allusion of the deconstructed constructed self.

2. Grand Theft Avatar by Second Front

In this artwork, I loved the idea of transposing a real-life ‘illegal’ situation onto a digitised world where the laws of the known world were later abandoned. Similarly, my project exists on a unstable platform, of combining both the physical world and digitised world onto the third space: the sole platform where the performer’s suicide can be accepted and executed.

Flamboyantly, the online characters commit suicide – like how I want my performer to be. However, I foresee my project adopting a more mellow approach towards death, accepting and welcoming it instead of diving headlong into it.

References
[i] Menkman, R. (2011) “Glitch Moment(um),” Institute of Network Cultures