Social Before Social

Appeal, an installation created by the group The Green Eyl, was an experimental project created in 2007 before the boom of social. Capturing key behaviors still seen with today’s digital developments, the piece comments on the interactive, participatory, and occasionally destructive nature of humans.

Appeel was both displayed in internationally renowned museums and presented as street art.  The brightly colored red or orange walls are basically a giant sticker wallpaper that consists of thousands of half-inch circular cutouts arranged in a grid. Each sticker dot could then be peeled, placed, and personalized by any observer. Not only was the audience challenged by the endless options of image, text, and design formed by the white space left from each sticker peeled, but they also have the same ability to mutate the surrounding environment with the sticker’s new placement.

Described as “disappearing and spreading like a virus” by The Green Eyl, the wall becomes a project needed to be completed by it’s audience until it’s exhausted.  The wall mirrors the characteristics of a social platform by asking its audience to become both a single individual with a unique profile and a participant in a community. Likewise, the wall creates the same anonymous nature as social media by allowing participants to leave their desired amount of information with each “post” then walking away. Blurring of lines between public and private space, the movement of the dots to surrounding walls, on persons, and even out of the exhibit reference the actual privacy of social platforms and disruptive nature of social media in other areas of our life through excessive sharing or unwanted sponsored ads. 

Similar to today’s social platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr, the dots urged people to act as storytellers and leave their personal footprint on the piece.  From simple messages and monograms to portraits and complicated designs, each participant engaged in a different manner and attempted to distinguish themselves from the many other projects. However, unlike the belief that today’s social platforms will forever hold our pictures and posts, the audience in Appeel had to watch their work disintegrate as new participants covered and manipulated the dots for their own take at the wall.

Just as social platforms have developed and advanced, Appeel also began to integrate more technology as they brought the project to new locations. Trackers were placed in each sticker dot for a later use of locating and gathering information about their audience. Similar to today’s extremely popular use of geo-tagging and location based services, Appeel’s use of tracking technology honed in on the amount of information this technique can gather.

For existing years before some of these concepts were completely developed and an every day action, the similarities in behavior are synonymous . Originally created in a lo-tech medium, Appeel demonstrates aspects of human nature that haven’t changed.  Highlighting the desire for interaction and personal mark making within a community, the social experiment emphasizes social behaviors that have always existed but are further developed when given an environment to act on.  The technology is not changing our behaviors, but rather, it’s enhancing our instincts.

Collaboration

"It's time to drop the competitive egos and thrive on collaboration and experimentation"

 - Mark Callahan, Artistic Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration

As an opening piece, I feel it extremely fit to touch light on a topic that is not only personal to myself and my creative life but also emerging as a major trend within the art world. While I've decided to choose a theme that introduces myself, values, and goals,  I come with the larger goal of setting the tone for this digital portfolio by requesting the exact thing I speak on...collaboration.

While collaboration, present in various forms, has existed for ages, there is something particularly interesting happening in today's world. We are seeing an overlapping  theme in work in which it artists take the world's increasing interconnectivity through the digital sphere and seamlessly blend it with the natural human desire for the physical. 

First introduced to me in my Net Art course, taught by Mark Callahan quoted above, this trending topic resonated the most and appeared almost every time I spoke with creatives about the future. While the Net Art course (to be discussed future posts) is a whole other monster on its own to handle, it not only changed my perspective of what others are starting to do but also how I, as a consumer and participant, act and where I want the future of art to go in this heavily digital society. 

Presented in Net Art, this video was my first exposure to the reasons artists pursue collaborative art and the captivating work they are capable of creating. Amy Franceschini is a San Francisco based artist who is concerned with notions of community, sustainable environment, and the relations between humans and nature.

While millennials are always identified by, and often taunted with, our reliance of technology and social media, I have seen a recent shift away from the expected. We no longer fully respond to solely digital campaigns or platforms. We've become desensitized to the typical banner or suggested Facebook ad. We crave something greater that will shatter the digital bubbles we've trapped ourselves in. 

As with every trend, the permeation of innovators, rebels, and avant-garde bring experimentation with components encouraging the exact opposite of that trend. Now, there's a trend promoting a greater shift back towards the physical. Consumers want physical communication, interaction, and participation. 

I believe that interactive design, specifically in regards to installations, has proven to be one of the most successful approaches toward satisfying all these recent demands. It offers the innovative and new desire towards physical involvement while still allowing us to work within a medium of technology in which we are already comfortable in. I applaud pieces in which the artist encourages participation from his or her audience then takes the multitude of responses and coherently composes them into a beautiful and meaningful work. This medium of work not only challenges the artists to think beyond his or herself, but the participant becomes fully engaged and captivated by their personal contribution to the work. They become co-creators. 

Unnumbered Sparks, presented below, was one of the first examples I found in doing further research during my Net Art class. Intrigued by this topic, I wanted to see if this type of work was even possible. Would the audience respond? Could variety in work exist? Was this just a one trick pony? 

Every day, I am learning more and more about the possibilities of interactive design. But again, it all boils down to one of the things I and many others crave most. While this blog series as a whole acts as my own response to the many things I observe and learn, I also want it to act an a medium of communication for those who also want to contribute, to respond, and to collaborate. 

Unnumbered Sparks, a monumental interactive sculpture in Vancouver, Canada created by artists Janet Echelman and Aaron Koblin for TED's 30th anniversary. Choreographed by visitors in real time through their mobile devices, at night, the sculpture becomes a crowd-controlled visual artwork on a giant, floating canvas powered by Google.