Tag Archives: instagram

A Third Space Fallacy

Project brief:

A Third Space Fallacy is an experimental interaction performance on third and first space that combines the responses collated on the third space through Instagram polls and stories to curate the next move in a friendship conflict between two girls (Bella and Daphne). To make the entire performance as real as possible, both girls had to put up an act in the span of 1 week in the first space, when questions arises from the people around them. Also, to stage that this is not part of our project for Experimental Interaction, our group have created another Instagram account @abracadabrrun, collating uninformed decisions made by our followers, which is part of the narrative of the death of Bella.

How it came about

Our group wanted to explore how people reacted to news and how easily was it for us to manipulate people feelings through social media. So we set the premise about a fight between two girls regarding their friendship. (we did consider relationship drama, but we felt that it was too cliche)

Introducing our main leads

We decided to go with Daphne and Bella account for this project, due to their frequent use of the app. Both me and Jasmine, rarely post on social media and this may raise suspicions on doing a project. In addition, this is fuelled by our goal of carrying out this experiment, without anybody suspecting that it was a experimental interaction project. This allowed us to collate unbiased data. Bella played the role of the victim, while Daphne played the bully.

Their background story:

Daphne and Bella met in secondary school in a Chinese writing competition. They clicked and immediately became best friends. however later in the semester, Daphne left and bullied Bella to join the popular clique. Years later they met in ADM. Having no friends, Daphne stuck along with Bella for the first few months before abandoning Bella again for the popular clique. Upset over the dysfunctional friendship, Bella calls out Daphne over Instagram, creating a drama.

The execution: 

We decided to post over a period of 4-5 days to build up the tension and the drama. In addition, we allowed our followers to takeover the narrative of the project. The direction of the project, the tone and the result of the two friends friendship is all determined by the poll results and comments.

Bella first post
Bella first post

Bella begins questioning her friendship with Daphne and ask if for advise, if she should confront Daphne. Following the poll, Bella begins confronting Daphne.

Daphne follow up

So Daphne sees Bella’s instastory. and indirectly poked at Bella calling her sensitive.

Bella retort
Daphne strikes back

The next few post are targeted at brewing drama Daphne and Bella

final poll determining her action

With this poll we aimed at bring the drama to Jurong Point, where Bella confronts Daphne heatedly.

 

When we head to Jurong point, Bella and Daphne roughly planed out a script and the direction that they were going.

bella’s death, the above text translate to: It doesn’t matters if I leave today, tomorrow or the day after, just as long as you see it its fine.

With Daphne leaving Bella hanging in JP, with the final words of just Gert out of my life, Bella couldn’t contain her sadness and died.

Reflections:

Through this project, I realised how scary social media can be as a tool to convince people. It was so easy to construct a fake personality and get people to belief it. The characters that we built for both Daphne and Bella were a far cry from their usual personality. Through out the course of the project, they received many concerned comments from friends and even strangers. When Daphne visited her church during the weekends, she was comforted by her church friends and group leaders. Apparently many were connived and so invested in our project, that they were afraid to respond to the polls.

Micro project 2: Telescroll

For this project, I was paired up together with Jocelyn, who happens to be my junior college classmate and now hall mate. Okay back ground Info time~

Cutting the long story short, Jocelyn and I met in Nanyang Junior college in 2015 as we shared the same form class. Both of us belong to a close knitted class called the AEP ( Art Elective Program), which played a major part of outlives. So we were in the same class for two years and then now we are classmates in your class again. (yay~)

Upon receiving this project we thought of the places that we could possibly walk, we wanted to keep it simple and kept it in NTU (yes we are lazy). We wanted to express  the idea of how our lives may  briefly intersect, but then separate once again. This idea was inspired by a conversion we had about friendship and our hopes for this friendship to continue even outside ADM. We have lost contact with many of our old classmates after leaving school, which greatly saddens us.  Then we thought of our journey to school. you see me and jocelyn live in the same hall; but the way we travel to school is very different. i prefer to walk to ADM cutting through hall 8,9,10 and 11, however Jocelyn preferred to walk around the halls or take the red bus to North spine and then walk down. We always have a mini debate on which route to take. I found it interesting how we were both traveling to the same place but with a different route. This is very similar to our relationship’ both me and Jocelyn came from a similar background, but our personalities are vey different.

Our route

So to make sure that the journey would take 15 minutes, we timed the journey it took for us to reach school via cutting through the halls and walking around it. The journey took about 13 minutes each.

Our sequence of action during the walk

I begin planning with Jocelyn on the content, on what we should do during the walk. At first i wanted to remain silent but soon realized that it was the best or smartest idea as the whole live feed would be extremely silent, extremely boring. Jocelyn suggest that we have a daily mundane conversation, about school, plans after class , but we felt that it didn’t value add to the project. we wanted to focus not the fact that we both had the same destination but have different methods or ideology. I then proposed to having a debate (different routes) ending us coming to a similar conclusion (similar destination). But, I soon realized that neither of us is intelligent enough to hold a debate without sounding ignorant… Then we thought of using parallelism where one of us would have a delayed reaction (for example if jocelyn look to the left and turn around i would do the same action with a delay of 10 seconds) but after using this gimmick for 5 minutes it would get boring. Building on the idea, Jocelyn suggested that we passed each other notes questioning our past, present and future. We decided to pass the note is: through the screen. If i was on the left side of the screen, i would pass the paper to the right side, where Jocelyn would pluck it out of frame and bring it into view. We also decided to change phone every time we meet. (downstair outside the halls, and at the zebra crossing outside ADM). This symbolizes that no matter a meeting is, we are able to influence each other.

Jocelyn set of question for me
My set of question for Jocelyn

 

So things that went wrong …

We faced a few problem in the first live video. Firstly you can clearly see that I forgot to stream in a landscape position… Secondly, we walked way too fast in the video. We did the first shot in the afternoon at 5pm for better lightning, but that also meant more humans. while we were doing the live feed, many stared at us and gave us weird side glances. That… made us very self-conscious and so our pace increased so quickly that the whole journey took us only 10ish minutes? Thirdly, our message passing thing didn’t really work. so the initial plan was for me to pass Jocelyn a question slip, where she will receive it on her side. But I forgot to “pass” her the question. so… the question intended for her were answered by me. Fourthly, we forgot to pass the phones back to each other upon meeting at the zebra crossing outside ADM. Fifthly, in general my live feed was very shaky and unstable due to my aching arms from holding out the camera.

unstastified with the end result, we wanted to do a retake. But lady luck wasn’t on our side, my phone was running out of battery at 17% (technically I could charge my phone via a portably charger, but I carry a iPhone 7… I CANT CHARGE AND HAVE EARPIECES ON AT THE SAME TIME!) and we were losing day light; so we had to postpone the retake the next day.

Things that went right 🙂

By this time both of us were use to the stares, so we managed to walk slower and shot more steadily this time. The note passing went fairly well, despite the lack of space in framing.