On Friday, April 24th, Mike, Josiah, and a group of virtual attendees spent the better part of two hours in the Studio with Ash Eliza Smith. Ash will be a participating artist in the exhibition Music.Video. which will run in our 2021 exhibition season. Mike, Josiah, and Ash will be continuing their conversation about how her work and how storytelling and the ‘virtual’ play a roll in her work. Of particular captivation was a conversation surrounding how we see and perceive ourselves in those ‘virtual’ spaces.
Activity: "The 'Me' is the Message"
"I am all things to everyone
I may be idle, but I don't know
The situation's really quite unique
They all believe every word I speak"
Radio Stars, "The Real Me" 1978
In our last studio visit, Ash Smith spoke with Mike about the unique opportunities to push the boundaries of our platforms of digital communication as we prioritize public safety while continuing to engage. Ash imagines opportunities to shift from the regular "talking head" platforms of zoom meetings and such to explore how we can engage with tools in VR and other media. This thinking also invites us to explore how our current practices lead us to interpret and reinterpret ourselves as we exist and communicate between the physical and digital spaces.
Materials:
Writing/drawing tool of any kind (pencil, pen, etc)
Sheet of paper
Optional: Access to a mirror
1. On one side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline of your profile (facing toward the center of the paper) to the best of your ability. Try posing in front of a mirror to see your profile as best as possible while you draw.
2. On the opposite side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline that faces and mirrors your profile.
3. In the space of the original profile, write a message of any kind. It can be a quote, an instruction, a question, etc. It could be a regularly used phrase you might use in the course of a zoom meeting or a facetime conversation.
4. Now, focus on the space between your 'faces.' Imagine that this space represents the gate between your physical self and your "avatar." As Kent Clark enters the phone booth to transform into Superman, how might we transform (intentionally and unintentionally) when we enter digital spaces to ultimately re-emerge and create things in physical space?
Within this space, use your drawing tool to make marks to represent a gate or portal between your selves. When satisfied, imagine your message in the original profile passing through this portal. What happens to it? Does it change in text? Tone? Purpose?
5. In the space of the "avatar" profile, write a re-imagined version of your original message, after it has passed through the portal. What is the message? Is it any less or more reflective of you than the original message?
CLICK HERE FOR Josiah’s Example
Clip from Ash’s Visit:
ABOUT ASH:
Ash is an artist-researcher who uses storytelling, simulation, and worldbuilding to speculate and activate futures—to shape new realities. Utilizing multiple platforms from immersive role-play performances to location-based experiences, Ash works across art+science, between fact+fiction, and with human+non-human agents to re-imagine systems, perception, and embodiment. Ash has worked as an actor, performer, musician, producer, director, and writer for various media platforms and is currently an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln where she has launched an interdisciplinary lab focused on story, worlds, and speculative design.
https://www.projectblanksd.org/ash-eliza-smith
ABOUT MUSIC.VIDEO.
What in the past was considered two distinct entities; divided by presentation platforms, legibility, perceived intellectual rigor, class associations, etc. have become a swirl of interdependencies, mutual mimicry, and genre bending. So-called High Art and Low Art have both maintained these characterizations as facets of their composition, but have also taken on board their inverse. Increasingly, both Low and High explore a hybridized middle, neither rarefied art object nor pop cultural production, but more something simmering between.