Final Project: Dementia Me

In my group of Four: Jingyi, Felicia, Qistina, Me, I was tasked to be the objective end goal of the game, while the rest were players.

The objective of the game is to find a dementia patient roaming around lost in IKEA. The patient is physically and mentally lost because she does not know who or where or why she is where is is. She posts updates on her location on instagram story and our players will go looking for her. The players are to help find her and help her find herself.

As the game progresses and the players are looking around for me, there will be game cutscenes uploaded as instagram posts, each post being a piece of the patient’s memory.

 

We brainstormed really hard to come up with a good idea which would include research and ideas we have learnt throughout this course. The video of Blast theory shown in class strongly influenced our ideas. In the end we settled for an interactive game which incorporates social issues.

The link below is the document to our initial ideas (not the main one):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dR1fVeYFiC0LwoZFrRAGqg_BhD-uSI_o5gPKgAt0NTY/edit?usp=sharing

We did more in depth research on the ideas of DIWO and third space and looked into novel but relatable and easily learn-able methods to share them with the public. The link below leads us to the process of our game: A Lost Dementia Patient in IKEA

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qEvEY-oKnKACENWyvhXUjD5E7eqO_W6S_G8lwoSvuFQ/edit?usp=sharing

 

I was inspired by SCP-3008, a survival horror in an unending Ikea purgatory

 

The location choice of IKEA is especially intriguing as it is purposefully constructed as a maze. With the various shortcuts and interconnected paths, IKEA seems to be intentionally created in a way that there is no correct linear path. It leaves people to their own devices to navigate their own path and make sense of their own route. It seems that IKEA’s capitalist intent of making people have to walk every inch of the space before finding a clear exit to suggest some sort of malicious idea of entrapment.

For someone suffering with dementia, this place would be a good parallel of their mind. They are at a loss as to how to navigate it and their sense of anxiety is further heightened as they roam around in circles, furthering their sense of stuckness and lost.

 

I personally believe that this game is a good way to creating a relatable experience for dementia. As non-dementia people, we struggle to see beyond our own lens and scope of experiencing life, and often cast judgement onto others. Through this experiments, the players can get experience parallels of walking into the patients shoes and garner greater insight.

I was worried about potentially misrepresenting the dementia patient’s persona, and was afraid we would’ve included too much assumptions or cliches to bridge the gap of understanding between ordinary citizens and the actual issue of dementia. However, i can safely say that with all our efforts and research, we have tried our best to include a non-biased, non-judgmental narrative , which isn’t too overly preachy either.

If any mistakes happen in representation, I would like to sincerely apologize. There was no ill intent.

With greater time, I wish we would’ve gotten more time to do more personal research, maybe even interview and personally interact with some youth dementia patients, to get a more unique an clearer insight on how to represent them.

Symposium Hyperessay

//._ insert glitch art gif.

https://goo.gl/images/CJhz3o

 

Undoubtedly, this has been the first online symposium I’ve attended.

I am a big fan of watching artist livestreams, artists talking while drawing and also giving industrial tips and design. I learn quite a bit from these livestreams, it feels as if the artists are guiding us through a tutorial and gently helping us on the way. The interaction and information flows both ways, allowing the learning artists and the performing learned artist to feel some sort of kindred comfort and connection in the third space.

 

In this symposium, however, the flow of knowledge and information is not just top down and didactic. I was amazed and inspired by the “globally distributed democratic community” telematically connected through the internet,  discussing, debating, and supporting the conversation.

 

With each new piece of information the main speaker Maria gives, other speakers will chime in on scholarly comments of personal interpretation of that project.

From the symposium, I learnt different notions of interactivity. It is a real time artwork, which “carries a promise and taints an ideology, or produces a feeling of liveness”. Being live, it is open to interruptions, and can “potentially interrupt and affect one another in a shared moment”.

I felt that this truly conveyed how information and opinions would be exchanged in this post globalized world.

In this post globalized world, we are faced with an exponential increase in interconnectivity and interconnectivity between countries and people. Thusly, we are faced with the varied multiplicity of opinion and perspectives, which fragment our conventional linear narrative of the truth. Speaker Maria brings out the term “Internationalism”, which is a distributed global practice, but notes that it’s also important to consider the transmission node locations.

In this new world state, we should aim to create a multithreaded narrative of the truth, one which encompasses many narratives, views and perspectives.

That’s where the symposium works best. In creating an open space in the third space, all people are invited to participate in a unilateral, egalitarian exchange. No one is hindered and rejected from the main narrative on the basis of inaccessibility, background and belief.

 

It can be almost described as an ideological arena where ideas fight for respect and to he heard based on their own merits alone. A truly egalitarian meritocracy, not undermined by the pressures of bureaucratic mazes and oligarchy. This media of ideological excellence and elitism, which is also a welcoming arena of diversity, is a direct challenge to mainstream media, especially television, says speaker Maria.  

 

Speaker Maria brings up Gene Youngblood, who first proposed for video to be considered an art form. On the topic of “being and Connectedness in Telematic Space”, we learn that telematicness is defined as live/liveness and interactivity; tackling response-ability, and the ethics of an encounter.  It can establish links between two remote spaces of the same time in a single performance event in the third space. It is the “most common digital performance of our time”.

These traits are not present in recorded media.

 

ANNIE ABRAHAMS

LIVE NETWORKED PERFORMANCE

 

Eggcellent.

 

3 milliseconds

 

Take me to your leader

 

My friends commented that their mutterings seemed so unsynced yet so synced, giving a therapeutic atmosphere, especially after the frenzied not taking just now.

We could pinpoint performance mistakes, like the dude trying to find a white wall but unable to do so in time, but the surreal inconsistency of the performance created a sense of cohesion

 

“You are my only hope obi wan kenobi!!”

At a certain point, I felt that their words resembles movie quotes. I led me to presume that the performers are each like computers or technologies trying to learn though existing knowledge and spreading information to others.

 

Annie Abrahams brings up “Computer slave labour”, supporting my insight.

 

“I almost feel as if we are neural nets being trained with various iterations of standard objects, as a reference library. The repetitive verbal cues sound like training signals”, “there’s an odd calmness here, as if they’re dream images or freud’s magic slate at work”, she says.

 

The performances in the two days showed different levels of intimacy. On the first day, it was more of a didactic, top down way of conveying ideas or feelings, given the nature that Annie Abraham’s performance like a recorded lecture with the intent of showing, teaching and conveying different things.

However, the performance on the last day felt scantily intimate, given the voyeuristic camera angles and movements. Different camera angles gave a wider perspective of the performance, increasing our immersion in the scene. The illicit performances of bdsm and leeches showed a very raw, human side to our nature.

I felt nerved watching them, and found myself averting my eyes often. The sense of wrongness seemed to pervade me and sink in me, making me feel wholly uncomfortable. To be frank, it was not the sensualistic deviancy which caused my aversion. Rather it was the sticky feeling of the skin, feeling as if in that moment i am watching them, i am a part and participating in their ritualistic movements. I t almost feels that i am both spying on them and watching something that i am not supposed to, and yet at the same time, part and parcel of their being and actions.

Upon reflection, I realized that i was truly feeling connected to the performers in the third space. So much so that the level and degree of intimate understanding and connectedness drove me into the feeling of the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is a common unsettling feeling people experience when androids (humanoid robots) and audio/visual simulations closely resemble humans in many respects but are not quite convincingly realistic. To interact and be with something that feels so viscerally real and yet is not made me step back and distance myself. Perhaps it is my body telling me that the manufactured feeling of closeness was so unique, rare and new that I should be wary and afraid of it.

We humans are wholly accustomed to seeing manufactured feelings of intimacy, though movies, theater and books, where we feel a kindred connection to the imaginary people. However, we can still differentiate that we are not part of their narrative and we can distinguish ourselves from being too entangled in fiction. I it think it scares us to see, feel and believe in manufactured realities as shown in the performances. Perhaps its because we would find it so realistic that we cannot easily disentangle ourselves from it. 

My peer brought out that the presence of helpers/assistants draws attention to the ecological nature of interconnected life forms: human/animal, human/internet, internet/animal.

I believe that this causes the performance to have a much deeper resonance as it touches on core issues that are deeply felt and relatable.

 

From this symposium, I’ve learnt that in this entanglement between machines and people we can make something. After all, we all inhabit a sense of interconnectedness. Coming together in this symposium is to have an experience to join us all in collective spirit, learning and endeavors.

Research Critique 3

“We’re constantly crafting and re-crafting it. Then it produces errors, mistakes, breakdowns, glitches, noise, and from a computer science perspective, what you would want to do would be debugging and refining. But from a dirty new media perspective, what you might want to be doing is “rebugging,” and pushing different aspects of the machine worlds to see their thresholds, and experiment, and play.” -Jon Cates

 

We destroy something, so we can expand on existing meanings and intent, bringing it to life.

 

In destroying the main, physical objective values inherently identifying the object, we liberate it from the expectations and functions the modern world ascribes to it. Just like how Ant farm took the original message of capitalism and consumerism and uprooted them in Cadillac ranch, we attempted to create an usurpation of meaning through foam.

For this project, we set blue foam as the target for destruction.

We broke down our destruction into 5 parts: each act of destruction sinking deeper from surface level to destroying the foam’s very core and integrity.

We chose blue foam, a material which is very malleable to destroy. In all its flexibility, the blue foam is able to be cut and crafted to the designer’s will. But it still retains its autonomous identity. I seek to destroy the foam in such a way that its pre-existing identity is gone, and in its place, a new meaning shall take its place.

In the first stage, we used a chisel, scratching and goring away the surface of the foam. We make indents like scars, reflective of how we attempt to remove the outer skin of meanings and judgements associated with the foam.

In the second stage, we stabbed into the foam with the chisel. Striking at random intervals, we gored deep and shallow into the foam, piercing through layers.

In the third stage, we made use of the indentations, groves and scars of the previous stages a nd physically broke the blue foam over its line of weakness. Brute strength allowed us to rip the foam apart, as if tearing at its very fabric of its nature.

In the fourth stage, we used superglue to corrode the chemical structure of the foam, further disintegrating its identity.

N the fifth stage, we clamped the foam and continued turning the lever, using mechanised brute force to compress the very air inside the foam, deforming it (or is it deFOAMING it? Hehe) Its as if we crushed the very spirit and essence of the foam.

 

We filmed the entire process shakily, infusing breathiness and constant jittering instability. We also filmed it on time lapse, destroying the sense of time and event of physically destroying the foam. We also added glitch effects to the last part of the video, distorting it and making the foam unnoticeable and much different from its original form. This brings to mind a message from the Glitch Manifesto, encouraging people to embrace new meanings through glitch: “The gospel of glitch art also tells about new norms implemented by corruption”

 

Through the video and the process, the foam is no longer is inherent integrous state, it has been destroyed and transformed into something not like itself.

 

We are not sure what the final creation is. To an objective bystander’s point, it is no longer a functional piece of foam and is considered trash. To an artist, its unique curvatures and marks of abuse may term it art. To each their own. What we have learnt is that through destruction, the foam has been liberated from its original intended purpose and can search for new meaning.

Picture credit JJ