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Network Affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

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  • Audrey Samson, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • Winnie Soon
This paper examines the notion of network affordance within the context of network art. Building on Gibson's theory (Gibson, 1979) we understand affordance as the perceived and actual parameters of a thing. We expand on Gaver's affordance of predictability (Gaver, 1996) to include ecological and computational parameters of unpredictability. We illustrate the notion of unpredictability by considering four specific works that were included in a network art exhibiton, SPEED SHOW [2.0] Hong Kong. The paper discusses how the artworks are contingent upon the parameteric relations (Parisi, 2013), of the network. We introduce network affordance as a dynamic framework that could articulate the experienced tension arising from the (visible) symbolic representation of computational processes and its hidden occurrences. We base our proposal on the experience of both organising the SPEED SHOW and participating in it as artists, and what we perceived as the lack of concepts available to express how the works modulated the space and the experience of the network.
Original languageEnglish
Article numberFJC-178
JournalThe Fibreculture Journal
Volume24
Pages (from-to)127-151
Number of pages25
ISSN1449-1443
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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