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.