Symposium Hyperessay

I attended the first and second day of the Symposium and although I have use  video chat before it is still very new for me. It was a first for me to have the opportunity to watch and interact with professional artist live and it help expand my knowledge of the art world as I now know about more artist in the field now. I also gained insights to their perspective and ideas at a very intellectual level of which I could barely keep up with. This essay will be  a recording of my thoughts about the parts of Symposium that stood out to me most.

Firstly, in Maria Chatzichristodoulou’s Keynote she mentioned a couple of projects such as the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, Station House Opera and Troika Ranch Surfacing (2004).

I had an epiphany that I had an impression that interactive media art was a modern thing, like Blast Theory’s projects- social experiments testing the limits of human interaction and voyeurism.

The thought that it could be applied in traditional art forms such as theater and dance did not occur to me; or rather I forgot. It could tap into imagination and other worldly experiences, bringing new possibilities into traditional mediums. 

The first time I viewed this performance, I did not understand a single thing. The connection was fairly smooth however the audio was not the best and for me it was quite muffled and grainy. After watching it for the second time, I understood that this was exactly what they wanted – the glitch experience of online social platforms.

Randall mentioned that it was an ironic performance as the performance was broadcast smoothly despite its purpose of playing with the glitch in third space communication. The broadcast did have a massive lag attack right after the performance which was really unexpected because everything before was going so well. Third space communication will always have a latency to it as the server takes time to connect as well and this could be seen when someone joked “How do you know she didn’t say that 5 minutes ago?” and Annie’s laugh was delayed.

An online social broadcast performance is a very DIWO experience; different from going to watch a live performance at a physical location. In a social platform, you get to see the performance and simultaneously chat (silently) with them and the other audience which you cannot do in an actual concert. The chatroom also gives the performers control. They can choose whether or not to include the audience which I imagine will then turn it into a crowd-sourced performance.

Annie gave freedom to the other performers to express themselves in their own way in the phrases and objects. There was a point where they made an attempt to make it look like they were in the same space by showing a white background. Borrowing ideas from Blast Theory, there is the play in between the boundaries of real and pretend. In Kidnap, we see how thin the line of real and pretend can be which reminds me of the Placebo effect where information is fabricated for desired results.