Telematic Alarm Clock - An Experimental Performance
WAKE ME UP
My project invites viewers to enter my stream as guests to wake me up as I am sleeping.
We are never really offline, even when we are off the phone, off the computer, we are still constantly receiving notifications, emails, messages…
According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 5.0 report, these are numbers generated every minute of the day:
Snapchat users share 527,760 photos
More than 120 professionals join LinkedIn
Users watch 4,146,600 YouTube videos
456,000 tweets are sent on Twitter
Instagram users post 46,740 photos
There are 600 million Instagrammers; 400 million who are active every day
Each day 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram
100 million people use the Instagram “stories” feature daily
the volume of communication we send out every minute:
We send 16 million text messages
There are 990,000 Tinder swipes
156 million emails are sent; worldwide it is expected that there will be9 billion email users by 2019
15,000 GIFs are sent via Facebook messenger
Every minute there are 103,447,520 spam emails sent
There are 154,200 calls on Skype
lol i just got 12 k notifications from memes and dreams
WAKE ME UP explores the bombardment of information in the third space that mercilessly demands our attention in the first space. It is increasingly hard to completely detach ourselves from this phenomenon since technological and networking advancement has enabled it to infiltrate into so many facets of our lives. We then find ourselves subservient to them and we unconsciously accept their hovering presence in our lives. This project amplifies this effect and presents it in the first space.
In the stream, I would be sleeping. People are invited to my sleeping quarters to disturb the peace in there. What’s intended to be a private and intimate space is made public and the guests are given the power to control the environment. With the freedom to speak and play whatever songs, they make or break the sleeping experience.
In this case, what happens in the third space overspill to the first space and affect my sleep.
This is but a critique of the third space and its shocking hold on our lives. It is getting too much but we seem okay with it?
Themes explored
1. Surveillance
How we are constantly being watched by people online
and how we are broadcasting anything and everything
We have our own autobiography online. In WAKE ME UP, there is a constant supervision over me as the stream is made public and available to everyone. Anyone is welcomed to enter the stream to watch me sleep and monitor my every movement. I am exposed in the third space.
2. Private vs Public / Intrusion of privacy
There is no privacy even when I am sleeping (supposedly intimate and private). Instead, I am being streamed for the public to see and disturb.Critique on social broadcasting thats intrusive. I am put in a very vulnerable position. Since i am asleep, I also have no awareness / control over who comes and who goes. In this case, I become a passive user of the third space. People who come into my stream can say anything and everything they want and i will just take it without complain/opinions (because i am asleep)
3. Presence ; the replacement of presence?
real-time/live broadcasting replacing the actual presence of a person in the room?
However, there is a lost of an actual human touch, physical interaction,
Mainly through hearing (especially since I would be asleep) I woke up immediately when Mark poked me. It was actually easy to get used to the sounds. I conclude that the physical presence is important and can’t be superseded by virtuality.
4. Overwhelmed
The internet never rests. It’s rare that the stream is quiet. There is always speech and/or songs playing. There is this crazy influx of such information into the chat. This spam continues till the end of the stream.