— work in progress – hypothesis —
I will not delve further into this topic within this essay, but if anyone reading would like to go deeper into what happened during the social outbreak in Chile in October 2019, they can turn to a lot of written bibliography and documented material in various formats (sound recordings, short documentaries, news). In the bibliography of this thesis I will include links to some pages in English that can be useful for a better understanding of the social process.
What was said in the previous chapter operates as a preamble for what would become, more than a hypothesis, an idea for a future project: a desire to write a new composition that can address these emotions and feelings about reality, spaces and what happens to them when we try to interact, through virtual spaces or platforms, to the information (especially sensory-sensible information) experienced from other spaces.
I will propose then, some characteristics for the work or general aspects that can help to shape the project, always understanding them as mouldable containers and not as rigid structures.
First would be the connection of spaces. This can be carried out in many ways and surely depends a lot on the distances that are intended to be addressed to make the work. This point seems to me central and important because it is not the same to talk about spaces that cannot communicate with each other in a strictly artistic way (such as dividing a stage into two parts and pretending -as part of the illusion of the work- that both sides cannot interact with each other) versus writing an artwork that takes place in two different rooms of the same building, or in different buildings, or even more, in different buildings in different cities or countries.
This first point I am referring to, can be partly answered by the second characteristic that I propose for this work: the piece (this project of artwork) is born from a personal need and not from the possibility of communicating spaces. In this sense, seems more attractive for my case to make the effort to write a work that can take place in different countries at the same time rather than the other possibilities suggested in the first point.
Thirdly, I would like the work to place the discussion about the characteristics of communicated spaces at its centre. While communication between one place and another does not seem to be a major impediment with today’s technology, the question behind this work would be, at its foundation, a question about the possibility of experiencing what other human beings experience in another space. It is ultimately a work that would explore sensitivity and how sensitive we are to something happening in another place, when this interaction is mediated by a virtual medium.
Finally, the question of the role played by virtual spaces or virtual platforms when acting as mediators between physical spaces should be highlighted. With this fourth problem I would like to refer to what happens when the medium through which the communication of spaces takes place presents “failures” that can range from not being able to transmit some stimulus (due to the absence of technology) to deliberately filtering the information of what is happening on one side of the screen to make the other side believe that something is there.