Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned

[ On S O C I A L  B R O A D C A S T I N G ]

|| In Angry Women (2013) by Annie Abrahams, female participants had their webcam screens lined up in a 4×3 grid and vocalised their anger in front of the camera. This entire project involved 24 participants, and none of them knew each other.

 

 

Having previously done a research critique on The Big Kiss by Annie Abrahams, I was really interested to see what Angry Women was all about.

 

 

 

Watching this video was pretty unsettling for me, and probably to others too and there’s a reason why.

 

When on social media, we send messages out to our friends, coupled with emotions embedded in our messages. Sometimes, it is also broadcasted to the public, not just our friends. Either way, we are likely to curate an image of ourselves online via these multimodal messages, and more often than not, create an idealised version of ourselves.

 

The emotion of anger is seen as a rather negative emotion since it implies conflict between two or more parties. Following this understanding, it is only logical to conceal our angry sides online. Now this may seem a bit contradictory to the proliferation of rants in online posts, but is definitely different in the sense that we are still somewhat hiding behind anonymity and not showing our faces, which also partially equate to our real identity.

 

In Angry Women, these participants were strangers but had to reveal their faces to each other, leading to them being a little cautious at the start.

 

” It was tough and courageous, but we are moving on 🙂 – very interesting and tumultuous.

We are still struggling to express our anger and we also still have difficulties to co-construct in this situation of lonely  togetherness. It’s exciting and sometimes overwhelming to try to transgress one’s limits.”

– from http://bram.org/angry/women/

 

 

In fact, research has shown that people regularly suppress anger in order to maintain healthy and successful social relationships. [1] Only by being in this space curated by Annie Abrahams under a ‘No Exit’ situation could they take some time to fully unleash their fury (much like She Hulk transformations, which is terrifying to watch).

[She Hulk] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ2Ts4BGs6efsafq1h7yVsVXw6n5HFV1aIcdOCD4jMOVuRmwr4Abw
Exploring anger as an unglamorous side being exposed also parallels how Annie Abrahams works her way around and embraces  glitches on the more technical side of this medium, as seen from how she turns a malfunctioning webcam into an artistic expression. [2]

” So instead of dwelling on the frustrations of the network connection, she finds inspiration, and perhaps more importantly, she sets up compelling situations that allow her and others to make critical observations about connection and disconnection. “

– Randall Packer

 

Since Annie Abrahams has a background in biology, she uses social broadcasting as a tool for investigating and testing out hypotheses that she forms about human behaviour. In Angry Women, the 4×3 grid is a curated  ‘Alone Together’ [3]  setting whereby participants are able to see each other all at once over the ‘Third Space’ (as coined by Randall Packer), and since it is a continuous take, they have to deal with the situation of “No Exit”, where they are forced to reveal unglamorous sides of themselves that they would normally unconsciously avoid doing so to others. [4] This social situation would not be possible without the aid of technology and social broadcasting capabilities.

Perhaps by learning how to embrace our ‘sloppy’ sides online, this could transform parasocial relationships into much more genuine ones in the future.

 

 

Resources:

[1] Riet, Jonathan Van’T, Gabi Schaap, and Mariska Kleemans. “Fret Not Thyself: The Persuasive Effect of Anger Expression and the Role of Perceived Appropriateness.” Motivation and Emotion42, no. 1 (2017): 103-17. doi:10.1007/s11031-017-9661-3.

[2] Randall Packer, Disentangling the Entanglements, Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium Website

[3] Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

[4] Annie Abrahams website: http://bram.org/angry/women/

 

Everytime We Touch, I Get This Feeling.

|| This week during class, we all got on Adobe Connect (it was my first time using this software ever), and immersed ourselves into the Third Space together.

 

We discussed about how the emotional bandwidth (the quality of emotional exchange between two individuals) of texting is significantly different from that of video calling or social broadcasting since we are able to view the voice and expression of the other party to fully gauge their responses, compared to simply communicating via words.

 

This experience was very new to me since previously we only broadcasted live together as a class but did not really attempt to make any interactions across screens (although this was attempted in the Telestroll microproject). As a class, we were present in both our local space (the first space), and the digitalised platform of Adobe Connect (the third space). Since we were all in the classroom, our remote spaces (second spaces) were all the same relative to each other. It was not possible to see everyone in the room at once in the physical world, but Adobe Connect sure made it much easier. It was also super cool to see how although we were in the same room at different positions, our minds were all in the same place.

 

We attempted to accomplish various collective tasks together, such as putting our fingers together with a partner beside us (not physically but onscreen), putting our faces really close to the camera and making a cross across the screen.

E.T. touch with our fellow classmates beside us on Adobe Connect. Photo credits: Randall Packer
Pen Alignment. Photo credits: Randall Packer
Onscreen Cross. Photo credits: Randall Packer

For these tasks to be completed successfully, it was vital that we negotiated and compromised to achieve our goal. From the simplest initial task of getting a pen out, to aligning the positions/scale of our objects/hands, every part of the job required some form of give-and-take. Even with the Onscreen Cross, if we were not involved in making the actual cross with our arm, we needed to know our job and do it, even if it meant doing absolutely nothing with our arm, lest there be an extra stroke coming out of the cross.

 

While we see negotiation on a smaller scale here in a onscreen microproject, these skills are definitely applicable to real life whenever we need to communicate with others and get our ideas through in order to get a job done successfully.

#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