Virtual Insanity

[On Social Broadcasting: A Communications Revolution]

 

|| During the Art of the Networked Practice 3-day (or night) symposium that took place from 29th-31st March 2018, I got to listen to very insightful speakers and witness before my very eyes how far art has grew simultaneously with technology. It is amazing to think how unfathomable all of these works would have been way back when the social broadcasting tools and platforms were just made available.

Groups like Videofreex were filming using the Sony Portapaks to create simple films, who would have thought how far this form of art could come?
https://videofreex.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/img_2520.jpg

 

Since then, social broadcasting has been used as a medium by artists to explore how communication and interaction between people can be altered through it. Annie Abrahams mentioned about how this change is not necessarily better or worse, but rather, just different. In her keynote speech, Maria Christochatzidolou (MariaX) questions the development of social broadcasting art by sharing a myriad of examples of works that use social broadcasting to push the boundaries of art even further.

 

MariaX giving her keynote speech on Telematic performances and the ways they have experimented with and changed the way people communicate.

For one, social broadcasting changes the way we perceive interactivity.

MariaX introduced the concept of the use of technology to bring people together into the same ‘Space-time continuum’, where people can transcend geographical boundaries and be brought together over the metaphysical ‘Third Space’ (coined by Randall Packer). This greatly enhances the opportunities for collaboration and allow more artists to practice the art of Do-It-With-Others (or DIWO), advocated by groups like Furtherfield and Blast Theory.

Throwback to our lesson about Furtherfield where we discussed how it hosts artists in a community that allows for the exchange of ideas between people of different expertise, producing fresh and creative ideas, a successful product of DIWO.

Together with DIWO came the concept of giving up the ownership of the performance partially, if not fully to audience members, such that they had the power to influence the outcome of it. One example of this is Kit Galloway’s and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s ‘Hole in Space’, which was part of their satellite art projects in collaboration with NASA. People from different cities were pulled together into the same metaphysical space through the ‘hole in time’ and the way they responded was completely unrehearsed, as with how some of them even started to organise meetings with their family or friends.

MariaX defined the interactivity of social broadcasting as ‘the performer being affected by the audience, and the audience affecting the performer’.Annie Abraham’s Entanglement Training performance was also a far cry from a passive delivery, rather, performers (some of which she has never met) were able to work alongside her.

 

Annie Abrahams and her co-performers whose actions were slightly rehearsed but nevertheless completely unpredictable and out of her control during the performance itself in Entanglement Training: Ensemble.

In the case of the symposium, I was participating in the act of DIWO literally just by typing in the chatroom. The performers were able to interact with the online audience and this allowed for a collaborative act of helping each other understand the works and the intentions behind them. Essentially, this flattens out the hierarchy between performers and audiences and changes the way we perceive artists to work and interact with their audiences (contrary to the idea that artists worked in isolation in their own studio space).

 

Next, social broadcasting has changed the expectations of human interaction as new dynamics are introduced with this new medium.

Social broadcasting nevertheless allows us to be hidden behind our screens in a safer environment that in real life where physical confrontation is a possibility. We discover this and over time, we find ourselves trying to paint the most ideal picture of ourselves online, trying to polish our ‘Digital Identity’, which is a re-imagination of ourselves, and our tele-presence projected into the ‘Third Space’.

 

xXxtra.Princesses’ use of Snapchat filters to paint an idealised picture of themselves as a digital entity.

In actual fact, the use of the Third Space encompasses the technical issues such as connection that come with it. To have the ‘Third Space’ in co-existence and seen in totality with the local and remote spaces would be to also accept the faults that comes with it, just like how we do not act in a perfectly rehearsed manner in real life, for that would be way too unnatural (the word in itself suggests that it is not characteristic of a living creature).

 

Arcangel Constantini also showcased one of his newest projects ‘bakteria.org’ that makes use of technical fault as a style, with the noise distortion soundscape and code glitch as a font type that gives rise to a unique and recognisable style. His little bacteria illustrations also represent how information is spread across the Third Space just like how bacteria spreads amongst people.

 

 

Annie Abraham’s works are quintessential to this very theme. In Entanglement Training – Ensemble, her co-performers followed her protocol to read out the latency in their connections, indicating how all of them are never really existing in the exact same moment in the Third Space, which may be a state which technology could ideally bring us to. However, she makes the latencies the very subject of her work and in turn explores the beauty of this imperfection of the medium to create a rhythmic, choreographic performance that really enchants the viewer.

 

 

“one millisecond”. “138”

“Excellent”

“Status”

“Connection status”

 

Annie Abrahams’ works are about the ‘sloppy’ side of people online and the intimacy between people. She likes to trap her co-performers in a state of ‘No Exit’ such that they are forced to expose their “messy and malleable” sides, prominent in her other works such as The Big Kiss and Angry Women. This shows how the digital medium is far from perfect and by making these faults the main subject of her works, we are continuous exposed to them and they are more normalised. In this way, we learn how to accept and embrace these imperfections more.

Annie Abraham’s work shops with our class!! We learned how it felt like to be following a protocol and it was surprisingly a lot harder than I thought because we could not rehearse any timings with our groupmates and we just had to give up control and let whatever happen happen naturally. This liberating effect was really enlightening and now I really appreciate Annie’s works even more than ever.

 

As the saying goes: ‘to err is human, to forgive is divine’. Then, following this train of thought, artists that work around the concept of the fault in human behaviour and technical glitches have already achieved a certain level of divinity. They have the power to change the way we anticipate the way our interactions online will proceed, and encourage us to embrace these imperfections as part of our newly established communication medium.

 

Last but not least, social broadcasting changes the way we want our new form of interaction to grow towards. 

 

After being aware of these faults and learning how to embrace them, where do we go from there?

 

With a new world comes new laws to maintain some sort of order. New morals and ethics will arise and they will definitely be different from that of the real, physical world. MariaX brings up the issue of “Telematic Abuse” experienced by a performer where although her physical body was not abused, the abuse was directed towards a fictional existence of her real corporal body. How will we define laws that resist this sort of acts? Can they even be counted as legitimate abuse? These are definitely new questions that will arise as we continue to develop in telematic arts.

 

During the symposium, the ethics of respect was questioned when audience members were conversing in the chatroom while the performance was ongoing and apparently some people thought it was rude was others did not. Whereas, it is expected that people stay silent when watching a performance in real life since they are occupying the same space and may affect the performance.

 

During the performance of
#exsanguination, the audience members were discussing about the significance of the leeches in the performances.

 

Social broadcasting also gives people the ability immortalise a moment, as seen in from works like Ant Farm’s Blast Theory. This can be wielded as a tool to call for action by the wider public. We can see this in The Pixelated Revolution 2012 by Rabih Mroue, where a victim continues to film a sniper who is hunting him down and eventually shoots him. The very fact that he does not stop filming shows that he believes that the recorded video will be able to serve as a form of evidence later on. The way that we use this form of evidence is even prevalent today in court legislation.

Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon allows the artist to interact with audience members within the intimacy of the bed space. Whether the same social norms and rules apply to this situation is still largely unexplored.

 

 

 

Station House Opera also staged At Home in Gaza and London (2016) which  also uses the technique of ‘dissolving’ to impose two images together to form a mutual performance space, where people could occupy each other’s’ homes, streets and social spaces, such that it focuses on the situation of people in Gaza, contrasting storytelling of Gaza versus theatre in America. This highlights the political isolation of people in Gaza and acts as a coping mechanism with the temporary relief of technology for them.

 

 

In conclusion, social broadcasting has revolutionised the way we communicate. It has changed our perception of interactivity, our expectations of interaction on this new medium and the direction where we want these new developments to head towards. Whether we like it or not, the ‘Third Space’ has already invaded and influenced our real world; whether we want to maintain its position as a partially isolated platform, separate entity, or continue to learn about it and embrace its faults to assimilate our physical world with the Third Space seamlessly is up to us to decide. We must continue to seriously consider the limitation of each form of interaction and find a way to strike a fine balance so that we can enjoy the best of all spaces.

 

 

Resources:

————–

Keynote Maria Chatzichristodoulou, artist Annie Abrahams, and artist Matt Adams/Blast Theory
 
Jon Cates / Chicago performance
 
Annie Abrahams performance
 
Keynote Matt Adams / Blast Theory
 
Social Broadcasting
 
The Symposium Website also has program information and participant bios
Bakteria.org by Arcangel Constantini: http://bakteria.org/
MariaX interviews Annie to gain insight to her work:

Annie Abrahams. Allergic To Utopias

Exp Int Readings #01: Open-Source Thinking

|| O N   O P E N S O U R C E T H I N K I N G ||

 

//              Before the advent of the Internet, creators had their works protected by laws such as the Seldon and Ford copyright patents that helped to uphold the ownership of their works by legal means and prevent idea theft. An absolutist propriety code could be exploited by larger and more powerful companies or individuals (as with the Microsoft and Gates mentioned in Sida Vaidhyanathan’s essay Open Source as Culture-Culture as Open Source,) limiting the concentration of expertise to themselves.  The limitations placed on idea sharing resulted in inefficient economic decisions. True ownership over material is also difficult to determine since “No one fully owns a book”, as Michael Walman says in his ‘Handbook on the Economics of Copyright’.

 

The introduction of open-source culture (OSC) by groups like Linux, liberated the restriction on human intellect capital by encouraging creators to give up ownership of their works completely or partially; in order for open collaboration and peer production to thrive. While licenses still exist to partially protect the intellectual property of creators, they promote the sharing of material in order to inspire and give birth to more innovative derivative information goods. With OSC, the notion that creators are solitary workers is no longer valid since it provided an opportunity for artists to utilise avant-garde platforms that transcended the physical boundaries of an artist. Such works, such as The Shredder, Glyphiti utilised the ‘metamedium’ that the platforms provide and incorporated interactivity, such that the participants or audience could determine the outcome of the artwork, instead of the artist, as showcased in Randall Packer’s article on Open Source Studio.

 

The code for the Linux operating system kernel was given away for free and has given rise to many distributions like the Steam OS (gaming) and Ubuntu (mobile devices) that support a myriad of software.

 

The Shredder by Mark Napler (mentioned in Randall Packer’s article) disrupts the format of a website and gives the audience ownership over this work since the participants are able to choose the website that they would like to enter to ‘shred’. Also, the webpage being ‘shredded’ is displayed in real-time, as such, the results of the ‘shredded’ websites will always differ, making each outcome a unique creation by the participant.

http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/shredder.html

 

This online interactive artwork ‘Glyphiti’ by Anthony Deck features a wall of glyphs. Each glyph can be freely altered by any visiting person to their liking. The aggregation of all the personalised glyphs then form the entirety of the glyphiti (much like how graffiti is done on actual walls in real life). I personally left my own pac-man drawing there.

http://artcontext.org/glyphiti/docs/index.php

 

Resources:

(1) Vaidhyanathan, Sida (2005) “Open Source as Culture-Culture as Open Source,” The Social Media Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2012

(2) Packer, Randall, Open Source Studio, IEEE Spectrum, 2015

(3) http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/shredder.html

(4) http://artcontext.org/glyphiti/docs/index.php

(5) Watt, Richard, eds. Handbook on the Economics of Copyright: A Guide for Students and Teachers. , (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014)doi:

(6) What is Linux? by The Linux Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFNiMV27VY

#02: \\TELE-STROLL// (micro-project)

 

(Had to post this as a video because I was having trouble embedding the live video into my post!)

Posted by Yue Ling Tan on Tuesday, 23 January 2018

 

So Francesca and I were paired up for our first micro-project and we decided to do a “Journey to the East/West” video!
Our live performance is a juxtaposition between where we live in Singapore (and we ACTUALLY do stay at opposite sides of the country), and it serves the purpose to show that even if we are physically located at different parts of the country, our living habits and environment around us are extremely similar. Our brainchild showcases the both of us having a stroll around our neighbourhood on a boring Sunday and learning about each other’s living spaces.

The process of making this live performance was memorable, and I believe the both of us were quite taken aback by the level of difficulty this task poses. When planning for the performance, we decided to focus on the types of actions we could include that could utilise and include interactivity within the realm of the ‘Third Space’. After collating our ideas, we came up with the mini storyline that is our brainchild. Initially, we assumed that it would be fairly simple to carry out the live but it was only after various takes and practice that we were finally able to complete the performance successfully, which, rather than just a simple live broadcast, was more alike to a performance on stage and made this micro-project a very peculiar experience. Coordination between both parties had to be practised to be more refined and it took a lot of communication to include the appropriate elements and to execute them at the right timings, bringing social art to the next level.

#01: \\Experiment in Social Broadcasting// (class activity)

Today in class we did social broadcasting! With our phones, we went LIVE on Facebook while we were all in different parts of ADM; during which, all of our broadcasts were collated on Facebook Live Video Wall platform. By condensing the local space of ADM and the remote space of the internet, we could gain access to the Third Space (ooh sounds trippy!) Hearing about this term made me remember what my 4D teacher mentioned in the previous semester about ‘metaphysical space’, which is a space that exists but is not visible. With the Third Space, we can easily access the visual portrayal of this metaphysical space, coupled with audience participation that would give rise to unpredictable live videos, the video wall was just a stunning piece of art! 😀

 

Posted by Yue Ling Tan on Thursday, 18 January 2018