Tying up loose ends |#FYP

A Quick Recap
As the title suggests, this update consists of further refinement of the project idea.

Just a recap; I will be doing a project based on the memory of death. The event of death itself is not an end result itself but rather, it kickstarts a series of sequences. In terms of a physical death, the sequences include the pooling of blood to the area of largest gravity, dropping of body temperature etc just to name a few.

I split the process of death into 3 different sections: the Before (~the death), During ~, and After ~. With regards to my own personal memory of my bun, it is as such:

Before – Of choosing the option of death, of enabling it to happen, the signs that lead to it (momento mori)
✓ During – The act of letting go
After – Realising the enormity of the decision and feeling the pain more

I will focus on the During, partly because it has shocked me the most, and is the most impactful of that particular memory of his death.

By clinically examining this particular memory, I wish to indirectly commemorate my bun, by paying tribute to his last moments and also as a form of closure for myself.

The project will take on my viewpoint of the death process, based on my personal experience and what I saw of it.

 

Branching Out

Of Death.
I tried narrowing down the specific feelings/themes I had during the death, and throwing out certain keywords which might be beneficial in helping me frame my project:

Themes – repetition, disappearance, transient, temporary, abrupt, distant/emotionless.

Characteristics: fragile, brittle, grave, extravagant

Possible mediums: glass, acrylic, paper, cloth, powder, string
*I would prefer the medium to be ‘organic’ and of physical material

Of my Brush with Death
Mentally, my emotions when it happened (During) were as such:
– fear (of what was happening)
– disbelief (of how this could ever happen)
– uncertainty (whether it was the right decision)
– resolution (my brain was convincing my heart that this was the right decision to make)
– shock (I was mentally tired and really could think no longer then)

At the same time, I actually felt a sense of wonder over how fragile life was and how easy death actually turned out to be. More keywords to frame the project:
– floaty
– soothingly eerie
– unbalance
– wonder

I was both wowed, but also traumatised by the experience.


And so, back to the project details!

Honestly, I am still pretty stuck over how to formalise the whole setup structure, but meanwhile will continue experimenting and conceptualising it.

Structure of the Project

I tried extruding common motifs of life/death/interesting shapes and converted them into installation structures

Somehow, I became fixated on the medium of black bubbles, on the basis that bubbles are fragile (much like lives), and they ultimately burst, but are destroyed so prettily.

Experimenting with Bubbles

Sketches on utilising bubbles as a medium

I wanted to create black bubbles – black to imbue the feeling of mystery, and for it to surround each visitor to their waist level. Such that the bubbles veils each person, leaving them uncomfortable, and ultimately bursts to leave a mark. Much like how death will ultimately come to each person, the bubbles as a metaphor of death is a constant reminder of it.

Ultimately, I hoped for the bubbles to be slightly hardier (more unb

I tried to visualise my own installation, and tested it out by creating a dummy mockup in paper.

I tried replicating two of the most structures which I was most interested in creating.

Tentative Installation Structure: surrounded entirely by bubbles/foam in various formats

Experiment 1: The plan was to fill the entire space with bubbles, but it turned out different from expected.

Firstly, I forgot to layer the exteriors with a thin film of soapy water thus the bubbles were not able to stick. The bubbles were also too fragile – but after all I did not specifically alter them to be more hardy.

Effects-wise, it wasn’t to my expectations. In addition, the medium of bubbles was somewhat tough to control, and not an ideal medium to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otq3rcvpVKo&feature=youtu.be

Experiment 2: Replacing the bubbles with foam, and fill the entire space with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dwTi-bge6k&feature=youtu.be

The 2nd experiment’s outcome was more similar to what I had in mind. I particularly liked how the black stains were imprinted onto the human figure, as though it ‘leaves a stain’. Despite that, it made me realise how troublesome this medium is, and should visitors ultimately come for the installation, they might actively avoid it instead.

Perhaps there exists another medium, with similar physical qualities to black bubbles but less messy? I was considering using cloth, and will continue to consider it the following weeks.

Overall, I’m glad that I experimented with the bubble medium… though it didn’t particularly work out, I wish to continue working with and explore different physical medium for the project.


Performance?
Prof Randall suggested that I investigate performative in the project, after I discussed with him an earlier budding idea (not recorded down on OSS) involving audience interaction.

Performance might be ideal in cases where audience interaction is hard to achieve, or if the artist has an intended narrative to build up.

As such, I video taped a few performative actions that might contribute to my overarching theme. However, it is still not yet integrated with the how-do of my project.

Or, here’s a fast-forwarded version of the above video (lacking action #7):

A short description of the actions are to follow.

#1 – Breaking Down (0:00 – 0:45 min)
What follows death is always decay, aka the breaking down of objects. Here, I break myself physically down, with staggering and exaggerated movements in opposition to the natural decay of bodies.

#2 – Clapping to alert (0.47 – 1.39 min)
A gesture attempting to materialise the memory, by redirecting energy spent on thinking of the memory, and translating it into sound. At the same time, attempts to alert others of the death is ongoing, as though through recognition would it become more real.

#3 – Powder Fiesta (1.39 – 2.48 min)
I am marked; for I have tainted myself. With this memory, I willingly chose death as a route for my bun, and with that, I am going to bear this guilt forever, willingly.

#4 – No Face (2.48 – 4.14)
I am ashamed to face, both my fears and all memories related to the death. I do not want to face the truth, nor recognise that it is the truth.

#5 – Slow Hello (4.14 – 4.55)
My actions have been dulled, just like how the sense of time has been altered for me relative to the neighbouring grasp of time.

#6 – Embracing the Inner Self (4.55 – 5.44)
I find peace with myself, but remain unwilling to bare my emotions to others (hence back is turned against camera). At the same time, I become more and more enthusiastic down this route of self exploration.

#6 – Reach for the Stars (5.44 – 6.17)
In a childish play attempt, I attempt to reach the goal (the aircon) within the camera screen. No matter how happy I might be, this treasured bad memory will always be a part of me.

 

The pertinent issue is to come up with a game plan for the final project rough guide as soon as possible.. of which I am still exploring.

Act III | The Death [Updated 17/4/17]

Screenshot of Act III broadcast

It is night, and somehow, the air is heavy with sorrow. She comes out for one last time, but her heart is torn between returning to the 2nd space, or staying in the real 1st space. However, she accidentally destroys her portal-frame on her way out: effectually fully closing the way she manages to flow in between worlds. She panics, for she is stuck, and she remains the sole being of a product of both worlds.

Isolated, she circumambulates around the only space she knows. She finishes up the whole of the broken, and realises why; she herself has been destroying her space with the X (close tab) on her hand. Her own existence is unstable – she does not exist in the real world. Thus, she marks her own finale: she X-es herself from the real world.

Act III: The DeathShe is now free, present in the real space! But what is she to do now??? Feel free to comment, or participate! (Part 3 of final project broadcast)

Posted by Tania Tay on Thursday, 13 April 2017

 

Sequence Symbolism
Crawls out of frame Reappearance into the real world
Accidentally X-es the screen Destroys the portal between worlds
Circumambulation Marking the end of the season’s finale; in searching for the end repetitively

Act II | The Birth [updated 17/4/17]

Screenshot of broadcast [Act II: The Birth]
Tania Tay of the second space finally gets out! She escapes the digital world, and starts to explore her surroundings excitedly, charmed by the temptations of the real world. However, she starts getting bored, and is suddenly drawn to the water, where she cleanses herself in a water purification ritual.

She wants to continue exploring, but later realises the sheer uselessness of life. She tries to seek feedback from her ‘hometown’ (aka the online world), later giving up and returning to where she came from.

Act II: The Birth

Posted by Tania Tay on Thursday, 6 April 2017

 

Sequence Symbolism
Climbing out of frame Literal entrance into the real world
Water Purification Ceremony An entrance into the world, washing away all traces of the past

Act I | The Awakening [updated]

Act I: The Awakening (First peek out)

Act I: The Awakening

Act I | The Awakening (First peek out)// Where am I? Could I get out from this space?

Posted by Tania Tay on Wednesday, 29 March 2017

Tania Tay of the facebook profile suddenly gains a small glimpse into the outside world. She is stunned, yet decides that she wants to come out. Tania Tay continually screams as her world shatters, and she desperately tries to escape, but no one hear her cries save for one.

But she remains trapped inside.

 

Act I: The Awakening (Bubbling Unhappiness)

Act I: The bubbling unhappiness

Act I | The Awakening (Bubbling Unhappiness)—————————-I'm leaving this space very, very soon! Just hear me come!

Posted by Tania Tay on Wednesday, 5 April 2017

She manages to come out, once again, but this time round, she has to fight against the other components on the screen itself to get her voice out. Here, she experiences increasing unhappiness about her life in the media world, revouches her intention to leave her world, and states that she would be coming out soon.

Act I: The Awakening (Bubbling Unhappiness) is a re-filming of part I, but functions as a follow-up and build-up anticipating the following Act II.

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

 

Grand Theft Avatar / Research Critique (Week 4)

Overview
Grand Theft Avatar (2008) is a live performance by Second Front, hosted in the 3D virtual world Second Life, stimulating a bank robbery of the Lynden Bank to liberate the Lynden dollars held by the bank. The live performance was carried out as part of the “From Cinema to Machinama” panel held physically at the San Francisco Art Institute, and the virtual avatars took on the guise of panel members. Impersonated panel members included new media artists and theorists: Camille Utterback, Char Davis, Howard Reingold and Christiane Paul[i].

After grabbing the loot, the members took a dramatic exit, first through an extravagant scattering of the loot into the air, and finally ending the performance by stimulating the ending of Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to stop worrying and Come the Bomb by riding hydrogen bombs into oblivion, Slim Pickens (aka Rodeo)-style into the sunset[i].

Artificially Expanding Reality
Grand Theft Avatar (GTA) is a metaphor on the blinding artificiality of the fabricated world. It is situated away from the physical space, remotely operating within no set boundary – within the third space, where laws of the known world were disturbingly abandoned. It disrupts and questions the known traditional social etiquette and structure, through fragmenting the sense of reality and imbibes disillusionment. The lines between the reality we live in, the reality that we act out and, the reality that we realise gradually becomes blurred. The constructed boundaries of reality are thus expanded,

The third space is a fluid matrix of potentiality and realizable connections to the most far-reaching remoteness.
– Randall Packer, The Third Space (2014)

Screenshot of Grand Theft Avatar: Liberation of Lynden Dollars
Screenshot of Grand Theft Avatar: Liberation of Lynden Dollars

Derision of the Human Presence
The group constructs their own alternate ego, the artificial avatar on Second Life, and later, disguising themselves as other personas. Essentially, they erase their own presence digitally and mindfully, as their digital avatars are the sole outcome of their personification on the Second Life platform.

In GTA, Second Front justifies their action with a ludicrous excuse – the mocking liberation of the supposedly suppressed Lynden dollars on the guise of a bank heist, and later, the wanton abandonment of those rescued dollars after escaping the venue. With this, they effectually apply another layer of mockery to the work:  the avatars themselves lack a stable existential identity; their ridiculous actions further fuels the hypothesis that in actuality, they do not function as per the known world, but rather, can only exist ephemerally, within the uninhibited constrains of the third space.

 

References
[i] Guertin, Carolyn. Digital Prohibition: Piracy And Authorship In New Media Art. 1st ed., Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2012,.

[ii] Packer R. “The Third Space,” (2014) in Reportage from the Aesthetic Edge

Cut Piece, Yoko Ono / Research Critique (Week 2)

 

Yoko Ono: CUT PIECE Performed by Yoko Ono on July 20, 1964 at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan. Photographer unknown; courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.
Yoko Ono: CUT PIECE Performed by Yoko Ono on July 20, 1964 at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan. Photographer unknown; courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.

Cut Piece by Yoko Ono is a performance piece first performed in Japan in 1964. In the piece, Ono sits on the stage wearing a black dress with a pair of scissors, and invited audiences to come up and cut her clothing one at a time. She remains passive, subject to the different reactions of the audience participants. Slowly, as her clothing gets chopped to pieces – almost revealing her chest – Ono holds up the leftover pieces of her bra to protect her modesty.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performed on March 21, 1965 at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. Photo: Minoru Niizuma, © Yoko Ono; Courtesy of Lenono Photo Archive
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performed on March 21, 1965 at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. Photo: Minoru Niizuma, © Yoko Ono; Courtesy of Lenono Photo Archive

Indeed a thought-provoking work, that is only realised from the interaction between the artist and the audience participants, Stiles argues that Cut Piece:

‹Cut Piece› entailed a disrobing, a denouement of the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scopic desires, between victim and assailant, between sadist and masochist: and, as a heterosexual herselft, Ono unveiled the gendered relationship of male and female subjects as objects for each other.

– Kristen Stiles, author of Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions (1998)

The silent artwork becomes an intimate encounter, between the artist and the audience participants. Parker states it clearly, Cut Piece becomes a

radical critique of the role and treatment of women in society in which collective audience interaction produces a powerful narrative of control, invasion, and exposure.

– Randall Packer in Collective Narrative in Open Source Studio (2015)

On a similar wavelength, Randall states that,

Works such as Cut Piece precede later examples of networked media art that involve not only audience participation, but many-to-many interaction between viewers.

Randall Packer in Collective Narrative in Open Source Studio (2015)

Not only is the outcome of Cut Piece ‘published instantaneously’ to the local audience, and art no longer subjected within the sole execution of the artist, art becomes an item which is highly collaborative. In the changed environment where the lines between artist and audiences are gradually becoming blurred, art becomes more accessible, heralding a new culture where social etiquette and art forms are altered.

With regards to the later Experimential Café, both works operated on a platform differing from real-time collaboration, but on similar premises. In this case however, despite a digitised medium to allow one to rid physical harm such as the case of the online Café, Ono knowingly took on the risk in her art, further challenging the platforms of art, and the societal act of interacting, and understanding art, while presenting her body as the object for the purpose of art.

 

Sources:

[i] Galloway, K. & Rabinowitz, S. “Welcome to Electronic Café International,” (1992) in Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds.). Multimedia : from Wagner to Virtual Reality ([Expanded ed.). New York: Norton, 2002

[ii] Randall Packer (2015). “Collective Narrative“ from the Open Source Studio essay. Just scroll until you find the section called “Collective Narrative.

[iii] PEACE, IMAGINE. “Yoko Ono’S CUT PIECE: From Text To Performance And Back Again By Kevin Concannon”. IMAGINE PEACE. N.p., 2017. Web. 26 Jan. 2017.