Networks Reading

Part1

"The Familiar Stranger: Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places"

The authors discussed the idea that we live in and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces, and it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Most of the time, those people are "familiar strangers". The authors explained that we often ignore our relationship between those strangers such as if a person that you see everyday on the subway fails to appear, you will notice. The authors designed several studies to explain the idea. I found this article really interesting because I feel like creating this kind of "network" really interesting after last week's lecture. I was thinking of making a project based on human relationships as well and this article inspired me a lot.

"I Am Searching for Field Character"

Joseph Beuys holds the opinion that "only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build a social organism as a work of art." I agree with the idea that every human being is an artist who from his state of freedom, learns to determine the other positions in the total artwork of the future social order. Relationships between individuals and groups are significant at all times and everywhere. This is what I want to explore the most in my project.

Part2 the two readings that I would like to compare are Artie Vierkant's "The image Object Post-Internet" and Pierre Levy's "The Art of Cyberspace". Vierkant Levy discussed the relationship between cyberspace and artistic works: messages are developed depending on different tastes and situations; the differences between such as creator and interpreter become blurred; and the divisions that separate the messages or "works" tend to become obliterated.