Suspended Animation: Building my room...drama! and INSTALLING?

11.11.09

Building my room...drama! and INSTALLING?

During the weekend Kate and I built our installation rooms with the help of Chris and Brooke. All were assembled really well and I'm pleased with how the space has worked out. We have been repeatedly acused of 'stealing all the dividers' and 'making sure no one else could have any!' ....it has been mental. :( I feel like we've organised and double checked over and over about the amount of dividers and it was all approved. The spaces we were assigned for SITE seemed (to me at least...) conditional on having dividers to build walls out of. It's a shame that people have suddenly become angry and started gossiping....I don't think its our fault at all.

Anyways,

I've been painting the walls....black and touching up the cracks. They're not perfect fits, but thats just the nature of it all! I'm hoping to make the walls feel like they're disappearing...So now I'm putting up shelves... and projector mount thanks to Max! and thinking about how everything fits. We've managed to get one monitor up on the wall (bolted through) and it looks great! (again thanks to Max for the wooden mounting blocks!) All the rest are measured up and ready to go as soon as i can nab the monitors. So that should be a relatively easy job from now :)

I've had a bit of a dilemma thinking about the height of the monitors. I've decided to have them lower than normal hanging height. I'm not sure if I can explain why, other than it just didn't FEEL right at the higher level. It felt wrong...so I changed them down and now I think they're in the right place for the room and the rest of the work and the feeling I was hoping for. I'm happy.

Also the projection looks pretty awesome. It's bigger than I thought (because of the lack of zoom and the size of the room) but I actually quite like it. The room is pretty black...and I don't want all my work to feel too dinky inside. So yeah, big projection! I think it actually balances out the room quite well. The thing is that now the size of the projection is a bit too big for a piece of custom wood as a screen...I'll just have to tidy up the seam in the wall as best possible and paint it grey. Think this is really the best solution. I'm sure it will look fine.

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Introduction

Occupying virtual space inevitably requires an adjusting and reforming of the structures of space, movement and time. Virtual worlds can allow a user to transcend barriers and borders that are less flexible outside of the virtual realm. Whether the barriers are political, physical or psychological, the attraction for the user of Second Life lies in the opportunities that these kinds of transcendence offer.

My works hinge on the notion of self-portraiture, as I am essentially dealing with the online incarnations of myself. I am particularly interested in considering the word avatar as a vehicle, synonymous with the notion of multiple selves; performative, promotional, fantasy, representational.

My works are representative of the kind of disconnection experienced when the user is no longer directly controlling their avatar and the programme creates a new kind of pseudo-autonomy for the simulated, extended self. Slowly and delicately, looping and repeating, suspended and animated, they never progress nor regress; the state of suspended animation.

Project Overview

During the first semester my work focuses around my exploration of virtual space. I am interested in what it means to embody virtual spaces and how these kind of spaces have come to shape our lives. This blog will document my explorations of Second Life and other social networks, my research, ideas and artworks that begin to deal with these concepts. My understandings and ideas about the writing of William Merrin and N.Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway and Anthony Vidler among the work of artists such as AES+F, Micha Cardenas, Pipilotti Rist and many more will appear here.

While researching I have engaged in many different forms of networking and some of the work I complete will also be displayed on a Facebook group page I have created, O.S.N.A.A -Online Social Networking Addicts Anonymous.

Second semester I am working toward my completion of my project for SITE in Nov. I'll continue to update the blog with thoughts, ideas, pictures, video, frustrations....

Essentially I'm now beginning my final installation project. This will incorporate several video and object works that come together as a body of work for assessment. I'm thinking of a working title of 'Suspended Animation: Between Myself and an Other' (OR Another)....Still an exploration of my online self, understanding online experience as conflicted, uncanny, uneasy, indescribable, affective, communicative, surreal.