Blog 30th nov Privacy and Honesty

Artists I am interested in:

Mark Farid (CSM teacher and artist) digitally based.

www.markfarid.com

I listened to his Monday night guest lecture whilst sweeping the warehouse at Raven Production Management Group. His decision to make his personal online footprint available to everyone was to me an exercise in boundary pushing, privacy removal and social experimentation. He allowed people access to all his data including his passwords, and like a note being written over, the more people who got involved and logged into his Facebook etc, the more ‘he’ disappeared. He found during a project where for weeks his online and phone activity was published publicly, that he behaved better and was surprised to find that he had enjoyed being overly surveilled, to the alternative which was a half year without his phone. He made the point that opting in to use of mobile phones has become obsolete, because in a practical sense, particularly in London, one cannot live without a phone or laptop.

Farid’s ongoing project proposal reminds me of ‘being John Malcovic’ in that he wants to create a system where he wears a VR headset and observes the world of someone else for an extended amount of time (several weeks) as they live their life ongoing. I discussed the idea with my father and he posed the question that perhaps the physicality of the observer would break the experience, for example needing to eat or urinate at a different or inappropriate time in the filmed characters day. I suggested that these activities could in fact be synced up, which would be interesting to observe. Irish comedian Dara O’brein once made the point that vr will never really go mainstream due to that nervous inability to see the outside world once in the headset. You can never fully immerse when a. you cannot see your own body (in some peoples mind, removing them from themselves/their souls in part) and b. you do not know who CAN see said body whilst you are otherwise distracted, and this is disconcerting (o’brian made this point with regards to vr porn, but I think it stands). He is talking about it here:

Regardless, Farid made interesting points about his project. He spent 70% of it networking and promoting, and working as part of a team and just 20% making. But he did go viral, so this paid off, however his main project has not been actualised, so did this truly work? Crowd sourcing. He came up with money through public, and he was never looking for ‘gallery’ approval. Outsider/counterculture activities were his aim, and feedback from his friends was essential. The power of being a ‘student’: you can break the rules more forgivably as a student. –where are the sexual assault perpetrators of London? Can I find any actors?

I also re-listened to a comedian/actor Tom Walker known for his work as Jonathan Pie, and his talks about poking fun at the media.