Third Person Party

 - concept -

Third Person Party (TPP) is a playful and disorienting experience to the senses, that gives participants a fixed third-person perspective on themselves and the world around them. 

Normally, people experience the world through one perspective: their own first-person view. However, in TPP, the only thing a participant can see is himself from the third-person perspective of a webcam. 

In TPP, the real world and the mediated world of the screen come together. To navigate this space of TPS, a participant is forced to discover the relation between the movements of themselves on-screen and their bodies moving. For example, when a participant turns their real head, their view doesn't change. Instead, they see themselves turn their head. The body in the real world and the body in the mediated world are the same but need to learn how to work together. This creates a disembodied experience in which the participant becomes alienated from their body and is forced to relate to their own image on the screen. 

While the webcam is normally used to bring the outside world to the viewer (self) or to broadcast the self to the outside world, in TPP webcam broadcasts the participant themselves to themselves, from a third-person perspective, in a world that is both real and mediated. In this loop, the participant is both the receiver of visual content as the content it receives. 

 - implementation and description - 

The technical implementation of Third Person Party is simple but effective. A webcam is placed in the top corner of a room or the end of a long hallway. The participant wears a modified Google Cardboard with a phone. The video feed is sent from the webcam to the phone - in this case via Facetime - giving the participant only a webcam view. The sending of the video image is done via FB messenger or Skype. 

A participant is given a Google Cardboard headset outside of a room or hallway.  In this room or hallway, the participant can only view himself from a third person perspective. The participant can simply walk around and discover the relation between the body on the screen and their own body. In later instalments, it would be interesting to have players do a series of interactive activities in the room like playing some games. 

 - visual -

- video - 

 - motivation and background -

I was interested in playing with the perspective and content of the webcam. I very much liked to do something with what was broadcasted on webcams and how I could turn this into an interesting experience that had nothing to do with privacy or monitoring. 

A lot of webcam art nowadays focussing on making statements about privacy. This is understandable since the webcam has such a strong connotation with monitoring and control over individuals nowadays and people have become very suspicious of who is watching them through the webcam. - the webcam on both my laptops is taped off as we speak - but I wanted to stay away from this while still using the webcam. I didn't so much want to make a privacy statement with this work, so I knew that I had to focus on conceptually exploring the idea of liveness and broadcasting of the webcam.

I ended up creating a playful and disorienting experience to the senses, that gives participants a fixed third-person perspective on themselves and the world around them. 

The invention of the Webcam (1991) had a profound democratic effect on the act of live broadcasting. 

Up until the nineties, the television had brought (and continues to bring) the live event into the homes of many. However, this power of liveness was exclusive to the Institute of Television, which had the funds, power and knowledge to do so. For television, liveness was an exclusive and valuable commodity. No media at the time could match the combination of photorealistic imagery and audio in semi-real time. A live-event on television became an event on itself. 

Until the Webcam. 

The Webcams name reveals its origins to the rise of the internet. In McLuhanian fashion, by creating the internet, humanity extended its nervous system and the webcam became its eyes. For the first time in history, it was not only possible to compete with televisions liveness, but also to broadcast oneself into the world. Video calling, cam-girls, live-streamers. While television brought the live world to the self, the webcam allowed both the world to be broadcasted to the self, as the self to be broadcasted to the world

Here we have reached the dialectics operation of the webcam. Either it is used to broadcast the live self for the other (in the broadest sense of the definition, both other people as the world), or the live other for the self. But what about the webcam as a medium of the self for the self? 

Here we can distinguish two forms

- the first-person self for the self; this is pretty much a mirror

now the next two I found more interesting: 

- broadcasting the second-person self for the self; 

 (this is for future research, which I couldn't work on due to technological constraints (I only had one webcam))

- the third-person self for the self; this is the liveness of the self for the self and I found this an interesting concept. 

The webcam has never been used to broadcast the third-person self for the self. 

The self as content, sender and receiver. You watch a live-broadcast of yourself created live by yourself. 

Third Person Party gives control over the broadcasted self. 

I started to think how to translate this into an interesting work and came to the realisation that I simply had to switch my view of the world with a third person view, which I could simply do taping a screen to my face using a Google Cardboard. It took some time figuring out the right tech to stream the video of the webcam to the phone and I ended up going with FB messenger because it was the easiest to work with on short notice. Interestingly, I had to create an extra FB account to be able to call myself to set up the video stream. So, I ended up creating a FB account for my Webcam called Cameron Webster.