Workshop 2: Internet of Things

In my work I’m interested in the exposure of intimacy and how can I create objects of intimate experience. Internet has become a space for fixating all kinds of personal intimacies through different platforms and media. And even though most of this content is open to almost everyone, people as users have the illusion of privacy because of Internet’s virtual interface.

How do our actions in the Internet World reflect in the “Real World”?

Nowadays we communicate our personality and express ourselves through different platforms in the Internet. We create social profiles, share, relate and propose complex social situations with text, sound, video and all the elements of communication that are part of this virtual world. We live in these platforms. Most of these interactions and “social life” stay in these platforms. They interconnect, but they stay and belong in this “other” space. And even though it relates to “real” events in the “real world”, it still is not directly reflected in it. This allows people to feel the possibility of an alternate world where they can be others and tend to engage in different forms of being themselves exactly because this world stays in this “other” reality. It reaches more intimate real life spaces with smart phones and other smaller devices but it still does not invade or incorporate to the person in its real daily life.

What would happen if all this complex social virtual development that we have would reflect in our physical world: become part of our body, incorporate in our daily life interactions. We would be exposed to all the things that we dare say or show in this alternate reality to the random public in the real realm.

My network life follows me into my “real life”.

I would like to make a wearable object that has input from my social networks activity and that reflects this activity with sound in real time wherever I am.

As networked objects will come to exist, our Internet privacy will be exposed through these objects in the everyday life. This other space has made people not realize how much they expose themselves to the public when they share and publish content in the Internet.

We have given in very fast to communicate with these “social tools” in ways that we would never do in real life. This often creates an illusion of what relationships are and how they happen in the virtual world as opposed to how they happen in the real world.

To make people aware of these issues I would like to make a T-shirt that broadcasts live audio of my activity in social networks and chats, and wear it in public spaces where this content can affect other people. 

I would like to register the reaction of people while I do this performance in different situations and also show this material.

I think to change the media: instead of reading text which is an internal process, having things reach you with sound (which is and external process that affects you) could make more understandable and evident the situation of how content and social network life is invading our life.

Characteristics of Networked Social Activity and things I wish to expose/communicate:

-Over exposure of oneself and one’s interest.

-Hyper-interaction between users and omnipresence of the public to your actions.
-Invasion of personal space and how this will be affected by networked objects in the future.

-Virtual intimacy vs. Real intimacy.

Workshop 1: Transformation / Idea 2: Towel moment

These are the shots that I like the most from this idea, although I'm still not satisfied with the results. I think more things should be controlled as staging, what people are wearing, the quantity of people participating. I would like to try in a more controlled setting by myself.

But these are the first attempts. Thank you to the mates that modeled and helped. 

Workshop 1: Transformation / Idea 1: Confessionary

So this is the sketches for the montage of the Confessionary. I made a prototype of the screen where the projection of my confession will be, but also to generate a space division between the person who confesses and the person that listens to the others confession.
The projection comes from the confessing person and on the other side the public becomes the listener.
The video passing through the screen instead of on it to give a certain privacy sensation for the person confessing, which is me, confessing lies about myself.
The audio I have modified, adding reverb to give the impression that the setting is in a church, where reverb and delay are more noticeable because of the space.

The pictures will be updated on here when I have them.

Pause

Julien Maire: Hand Jet Printer

Workshop 1: Transformation / Idea 2: Towel Casting

Towel casting!! I need two more towels to make this possible, if you have any that you could bring over tomorrow it would be great!
(And I might need you too for a couple of hours!)

Dictionaries

Workshop 1: Transformation

Diagram of what usually my work revolves around, I tried to visualize what would be a different approach and came up with these two possible ideas.

Idea 1: The first idea I initially thought of staging a public confessionary, and look for a way to keep it anonymous, but this still revolved around the way I already viewed my work of exposing mine and others intimacy. So the real twist came into staging a confessionary of fictional confessions, lies.
So it would be staging an intimate moment that in fact is not real.

Idea 2: The second idea proposes looks for a way to expose intimacy without it being there at all. But instead showing what surrounds it, what elements are around it, characterize it and could make something intimate. For this I chose an intimate moment from my memory. As a child and still now, to change in the beach I would ask someone of trust to hold a towel around me so I could have privacy.

I would like to make a group towel covering, not allowing others to see what is inside, but there is really nothing there.