"We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old." (McLuhan, pgs 94-95)
The social world becomes increasingly less atmospheric the further into the Digital Age we get. The cacophony of of information constructing the world we live and interact in conflictingly becomes oversaturated while dulling to a white noise. As the social world continues to entangle further into our lives, we’re threatened with dissipating, and meet this with the time-honored practice of holding true to our values, our belief, our idea of Self as rooted in our Western, individuality-centered culture; we feverishly cling to the perspectives we know. We face the inability to find solid ground, to focus our attention on seeing the world as it is. My inspiration stems from my own sense of disconnect, my own grappling with maintaining the Western, hyper-individualized life in an over-stimulating social world, the immediacy creating a dissonance I am yet to fully adjust to. The project, It Gets Murky; The External Manifests, addresses these ideas through centering the background as foreground, journeying from our self outward while exploring the interplay of the social environment.
I feel like my creative choices came together and solidified into the project that this actually is during the phase of organizing the album and titling them. To be honest, I was surprised about that. But through searching to a visually appealing presentation of the body of work, it became clear there was some sort of narrative organization to the photographs. The first subsection presents truly private moments–expressions of self. The transition into slow realization of the presence of the social environment in our private lives can be seen as the photos move through what can presumably be an average day. By depicting the encroachment of the technological environment and culture into our personal lives, I hope to reflect the shift towards a hybridization of identity–part private, part digital. (Does this make us cyborgs?)
I noticed that the beginning highlights the curation of daily life, and interaction with the environment and self through creation, before reinforcing the ways we tend to cling to our individuality as we venture further into the social world towards the end of the series. The transition into the external world linking compositionally to the previous is something I really liked. Being a disparate part of the birthday celebration with a stranger, something where only a few days ago you may have been in that same space holding a balloon next to a full coat rack, is a uniquely alienating and unifying moment. I felt it worked well next to the photo centering the experience of being congregated to watch the algorithm of a stranger. Alone or together, you’re shaped by the complex forces and consequences of blurred boundaries between the public and private. Our engrained desperation to cling unaware to our Western sense of individuality for comfort in our evolving world will only distort our experience of life. By consciously adjusting our filters to account for the world and focus in on our experiences, we can begin to learn how to move forward, adapting to the new demands of the reconstructed digi-social society we exist as an integral part of.
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