My Itchy Fingers

The World’s Slowest SMS vs Broken Satellites – Night Festival 2010

Many people send lotsa SMSes a day, which are then received almost instantly. So what happens if it takes more than 20 minutes to receive an SMS? Would you still prefer to send SMS or pick up the phone instead? Judging by the response of users on the Night Festival 2010 two weeks ago, the answer was quite clear.. :p

Presented by Wit Pimkanchanapong from Thailand, a giant billboard was installed in front of the Singapore Art Museum. This was one of the most interactive installations Itchyfingers have seen…

Bringing back the days when technology was less developed and instantaneous,
this is a tongue-in-cheek, interactive artwork where messages received are
manually assembled by a team of humans on a giant billboard for five minutes
for all to read!

The individual alphabets on huge hardboards were placed in a big black bag
and manually lifted up for assembly…

Behind-the-scene…

Crews were secured with harness to prevent accidents from happening..

Crew shouting out to a “Elicia”, whose name was plastered on the billboard
with a love message…I was just commenting why no people send those
proposal message before this came out…Afterall, it only cost a normal
SMS fee to send the message.. Aiyo! Wonder why no picture was taken! 😦

Being Itchyfingers, we had initially wanted to send in our message too. But the sign said that only selected SMSes with less than 60 characters would be displayed and it would take a minimum of 20 minutes before appearing on the billboard. I thought of sending a “Visit http://www.myitchyfingers.wordpress.com” message, but Tisu Boy said it might not be selected as they might not want to display “advertisement”. 😦 And there were a lot of people crowding around whom might be waiting for their own messages to appear, which would mean that the actual waiting time might exceed 20 minutes if ours were to be selected. But we couldn’t wait that long cos we wanted to rush back to the National Museum for another performance. 😦

One last message before we popped over to the National Museum…

Six giant satellite dishes were set up outside the National Museum. This
was before the start of the show…

Didn’t really read the synopsis of the performance, so wasn’t too sure what to expect. The performance didn’t start until about 10 minutes later when this lady appeared on a tall platform in front of us…

Dressed in skin-tighted latex suit, this lady seemed to be doing some sort
of warming up with squatting and stretching…We thought she was supposed
to do some stunts or leap into the air…Everyone waited in anticipation…

Then another five minutes or so after she did her “warm-ups”, finally music started…and guess what…

This lady was just a music “conductor”… controlling the four musicians
in front of the museum building…Not even sure when did they appear…

Din realise the violist was a lady…

The music soon awaken this lady from her sleep and started dancing…

..with some acrobatic moves and running around…The music was more
like sound effects, totally ‘controlled’ by the ‘conductor’

Titled “Paraboles 2.0”, these six giant satellite dishes “stretched out to the sky
and remained still, ignoring all activities on Earth. At the core of the satellite
dishes, stroboscopic light flashes quietly, signalling activity. They are looking
at the stars, downloading cosmic data, absorbing the sound of space. Under
each satellite, we hear faint abstract sounds. It is the music of the stars,
solar winds, and radio waves, all mixed together in a surreal, random
composition”, as described on the official guide for the Night Festival

Wow. Wonder why sometimes people can come out with such fanciful write-ups. Personally, I felt confused by the images flashing on the satellite dishes – from abstract images to eyeballs to swimming sperms…what on earth was happening? And what was the Dancer doing, running here and there? Totally “catch-no-ball”… 😮 Well, but these were all my personal thoughts on the performance…There might be others with higher level of appreciation for the fine arts, totally mesmerized by the performance… :p

The Dancer braved a flight of stairs to plant herself into this globe thingy
which revolved around…

Finally, the group decided they had enough of solo performances of dancing, running and waving hands in the air. The lukewarm applauds from the audience might be a hint that the performance was not as well-received as that of last year…So I guess I was not the only one feeling that time was a stretch standing on the ground of the museum, politely waiting for the show to finish instead of walking off like some others :p

In the end, I wished I had sent the SMS message and stayed on to wait for it to appear…

Also see related post:
> Wolves in Sheeps’ Skins – Head On by Cai Guo-Qiang
> Night at the Museum – Night Festival 2009