MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace
9 - 11 October 12:00 - 19:00, Weltraum Galerie, Rumfordstraße 26, Munich, as part of the Symposium Netzkulturen at the University of Munich. With Johanna sophie santos bassetti.
the chance to create your own RealSpace (NOT trademarked)
MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace is the chance to create a profile and network with like-minded people in 'meet-space' or 'reality' as some people call it.
Once you have filled in our account questionnaire (with a pen or pencil), and thought up a user name, you are given an A5 cardboard tray. It's not much in terms of server space, but it is real. Using scissors, paper, glue, magazines and anything else you can fit in a cardboard tray, you can thumb your nose at html, css and php and experience a profile with the full colour gamut that reality gives you. You can even make it smell.
When your profile is ready, you can install it in the server architecture (some wooden shelving in a window) and message other account holders using the sophisticated glue-on-envelope smtp servers.
- We make the following promises to you (and keep them unlike certain others we could mention):
- Your profile is your property: you can take it away at the end of the exhibition
- If you don't like your profile, you have the right to delete (destroy) it
- Your profile will not be sold on to any third party
- We will not compromise your security by allowing identity theft
MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace was initially concieved for Futuresonic's 'Social Networking Unplugged' festival in 2008 in Manchester, UK. Below is a report of how it went there.
MySpace — YourSpace — OurSpace Manchester Report
We would like to send all our thanks to the people who came to Café Pop and made so many wonderful Spaces. We overwhelmed with the response and 95 Spaces were made.
During the five days, the networking aspect of the project, where you could leave messages for other participants, really took off. We had people finding flats in Cologne and school children from different schools exchanging phone numbers.
On the third day the project went viral with people bringing friends along, phoning each other to say that they had messages to pick up and spending time either in the café or outside the window. Some people had seen what we were doing and bought images or objects down to be included in their Space. Two people took the empty boxes away overnight and returned the next morning with completed Spaces.
There was an instance of account deletion, where a girl who had made a Space wasn't satisfied with it, made another one and asked us to remove the first one she made. We even had a couple of incidents of spamming where people leafletted Spaces that they thought might be interested in their club night based on what their Space looked like.
One morning, we even had a 'server crash' where one heavy Space was knocked out of the shelves, pulling two whole rows down with it.
People really took the project to heart and we feel extremely happy with the response from the participants, the support from Futuresonic, who found us the perfect space in the Northern Quarter and our hosts, the wonderful vegetarian Café Pop.
We would like to thank Kit, Drew and the Futuresonic team, the sociologists and ethnographers from the Universities of Manchester and Lancaster, Mat Fenton, Martin and Lee at café Pop and of course our collaborator for this project, Sian Robinson Davies.
more images on flickr
