Roy Ascott's "Is There Love In the Telematic Embrace?"

When I mentioned this piece in my blog from freshman year, all I really got from it was the fact that multimedia is not an extension of traditional forms of art, but its own new collection of tools. I had decided that media pieces make the content more obvious than a painting or drawing.

That's it.

Reading this article again is very helpful when thinking about my project from this semester. I now see that content in telematic pieces can be even more complicated than in traditional art, because it is constantly changing due to either the participant or the whims of the data based on the participants actions.

I like the idea of the artist being the facilitator. The artist (me) performs interviews and collects information. But the interviewee is also an artist in the sense that they can create the fictional story on their own and also tell me the truth the way that they see it. That person is a participant in my work, but then there is the third party who participates in the actual piece...watching and listening to the story of stranger, organized by me, and having the ability to choose different endings and branches of the narrative.

I like this better than doing something like Jodi.org for my specific project. In Jodi, the participant clicks what they want to, but they don't know what they are going to get. In my piece they don't know what exactly will happen, but they make a conscious decision based on the information given to them from Part I of the stories.

The idea of using telematics is an interesting one to me, just like Char Davies virtual reality spawned new ideas in my head.
My work could turn into a website instead of a DVD. People could add their own stories, and add fictional parts to other people's stories, further complicating the content of the piece.

There could even be a "random" section where data information systems produce a newly mixed narrative each time. Even though the data is immaterial, like Ascott says, you can use it to change the content and medium based on participation or lack thereof. While having the data make its own random decisions could be interesting in terms of new storyline, artificial intelligence is something I don't think I'd want to ever use in my work. Maybe I have watched too much Terminator, but it scares me to have computers and data make decisions. I think humanity and interaction between humans USING technology is key, but only as a tool.