On the W@terfront (Oct 2008)
THE EFFECT OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS IN DISPLACING REAL PLACES
Abstract
The sudden change of my communication medium after moving to UK had a great impact on my daily life. My intimate relations with my family and friends started to happen and lost between lines of virtual environment. While trying to situate myself within that new environment I started to question its abilities and disabilities versus face to face communication that I am used to, with all hand gestures and mimics that are totally lost in that new environment. On the other hand, I discover the great potential of telematic environment that helps me to share my daily life in UK with people that I left in Turkey. I can involve two different cultural contexts at the same time just with one click; webcam creates within its small square shaped frame the visual link at real time and improves the quality of interaction within a distance of thousands of kilometres. Currently, I am narrating my own personal experience with a short film that is made out of stills, which are taken many different moments from celebrations to faced empty, dark rooms; from video calls between two countries. The potential of virtual environment has been discussed and takes part in art world as telepresence art since 1990. People are highly interested in telematic projects due to the big opportunity to experience a new environment, that hasn’t been possible until the public spread of World Wide Web. The possibility to link different people at the real time also helps widen the scope of public art not only in terms of a new medium, but also in terms of the possibility to reach wide range of people all over the world while still being able to connect everywhere.
