A Personal Experience

The final chapters of Windows and Mirrors assured me with this idea: the combination of technology and art is making communication a highly personal and individualized experience. Art galleries are no longer just a static space where people wonder about and evaluate the same content. The T-garden, described in Chapter 7, for example, is a perfect example of how moldable an art space today can be.

Here's a video I found about the room (the third room of Siggraph 2000 galleries) so that we can see it visually.

TGarden Summary (2001) from Topological Media Lab on Vimeo.

This idea reminded me of a theatrical performance I went to. It's called Modern Odyssey by Playing with Reality Company. At each performance, the audience would volunteer to be the hero of the story (which they choose from different settings including the wild west, future, mystical land, etc). As the volunteer actor/actress enters the world of the story, the rest of the audience would observe from the screen while the actor steps into another room where the play happens. The idea of the production is to create personalized experience of the stories, which is similar to what new media aim to achieve. Interactive media enable people to become a part of the creative process of the final products rather than just being on the other side, accepting information.
I can conclude from what we've learned from the book that the current communication methods especially in art world is going towards two trends: personalization and globalization. As we can see, the audience is becoming more and more individualized as opposed to being categorized according to their ethnicity, age, gender, etc. making the communications between the presenters and the audiences more specific towards each individual, actually makes the exhibition more accessible and comprehensible in a global scale.
Terminal time is an inspiring project in that it makes us think about how limited one person, or even one group of people's view and knowledge of the world can be, and how differently we focus (on problems, issues of the world). Sometimes we don't realize that our life is just one small aspect of what humanity encompass. As I was listening to the rehearsal of a symphony the other day during a tour around Lincoln Center Theatres, I cannot help but think about how people are living in parallel universes although they meet face to face each day. The information we receive or retrieve, the media we use to access to news, the way we interact with the environment and our society make our lived multi-facet. There's an unseen dimension created by media: what we know, what we choose to know put us in completely different worlds.