Micro-Project 2- Crowd-sourced Art

In regards to the idea of crowd-sourced art, my understanding towards this meaning could be simplified into words like “interaction” ,  “involving” , “sharing” and “participation”. In which to further explain, it is the ideology of getting third parties to be involved in an activity for an artist to generate responses that is beyond our own personal capability to produce alone. An example could be like a survey poll to understand the demographic and perspective of of all group towards their liking of an artwork as different age group may have different personal view.

Without going further, during the activity, our team have decided to made use of the concept of first impression, and our art piece is to manipulate audiences point of view towards us through poses to tweak the perspective of the poser. We want to prove that people are usually judgmental and made assumptions for things that strangers do without knowing them further. In this case, our team, Daenia, Qi Yan and I were the creators of the art work and I am “used” as a subject to pose the actions. We have then proceeded with the platform to use, which was social media, Instagram. The rationale was that since private Instagram are usually followed by friends, this meant that majority of their followers were strangers to me and vice versa. This would be interesting when they see a stranger that they did not know and they would be more harsh and blatant towards their personal views to me.

From the pictures above, I was made to do 3 poses by flaunting my unsightly abdominal, arm in front of the mirror to develop the feeling of a narcissistic person who is obsessed with my own physique and lastly a frontal shot of my narcissistic look. On top of the poses, our team had also crafted the following questions to trigger the responses of the audiences.

  1. Use one word to describe him
  2. Is he a playboy?
  3. Would you befriend him?
  4. Do you think he acts like a gangster?
  5. Would you let him meet your family?

These were the responses that we have garnered during the span of 45 minutes.

Use one word to describe him
Positive responses: Muscular, lean, sincere, caring, friendly, amazing, my type, fit, good
Negative responses: Superficial, trying, narcissistic, arrogant, ah beng, vain, f’boy, serious

Is he a playboy?

Yes: 8, No: 6

Would you befriend him?

Yes: 19, No: 7
Do you think he acts like a gangster?

Yes: 8, No: 7

Would you let him meet your family?

Yes: 8, No: 7

Based on the responses that were bold, it was quite an interesting sight to see how they responded. With the fact that all questions are open ended instead of polled questions. Some audiences even provided rationale for their judgement which is interesting. Examples are these.

“Do you think he acts like a gangster?”

“Would you let him meet your family?”

“Would you befriend him?”

The responses were able to prove that the people are judgmental and made pre-assumptions for actions made by unknown strangers. I have also decided posted the same pictures into my personal Instagram account to find out if people are usually judged based on their actions most of the time. Interestingly, these were what I have received from them.

“Is he a playboy?”

“Use one word to describe him”

Interestingly, this experiment had brought out another meaning towards impression judging and I realised that actually people are usually judged for the first time because of their actions in front of other people. Even though these were sent to my friends that have known me well, there were comments made by them questioning my intentions on doing this as they thought that I was seeking attention. I have successfully attracted their attention. From the start, I did not tell them specifically that they need to judge me based on the pictures that they saw as per the group intention for this micro project. What I had told them was that “I am doing this for a project, I need you to be truthful for your responses” rather than telling them that I am doing a project on first impression and I am doing things that I have no done for the first time, I want you to see me as a stranger or not be shocked for what I do next.

People were responding based on whatever that they have seen from the pictures accordingly with many interesting personal perspectives. Friends whom I have no kept in contact for months have participated in this project together with me which made me realised how we are all busy with our lives nowadays, but we would still kept track of each other’s lifes through social media posting and our interaction were usually based through virtual communications than real life face to face. This is a plus point of how our project had managed to get the participation of online users due to the function of social media.

In which, our crowd-source project is unique in the sense that not because I have “sacrificed” myself as a subject to gather audience’s feedback and participation. It brings out the virtual interaction of strangers to strangers when they commented on me, it is actually an indirect communication of what other people has to say about you through social media. This is what made social media became a powerful indirect bulling tool online as we do not know the audiences in real life but we can feel the virtual remarks literally like stab wounds on our body behind the screen.