I will create a background that will consist of a city landscape on a digital interface. Using stock photos, I will apply selection logic for the background of the painting. The digital painting will be done on Photoshop; it will contain abstract elements as well as concrete ones to create a surreal environment. Copy and Paste methods will be employed digitally as well as analog. Once the background is finished and printed out, more city structures will be glued on: providing a contrast between the seamless copy and paste methods done digitally with the methods done with a glue stick and paper. This method will allude to Lev Manovich’s copy and paste vs pixel and filter rhetoric in Post Modernism and Photoshop. The discussion of the logic of selection is predominate within the dialogue of culture and its transition through media. I will further play on this transition by including time based media on top of the digital painting.

 

Within a world that has media elements that can be taken from an archive, isolated, copied, and assembled into new combinations, I apply signals and filters to increase suggestions on sovereignty. Lev Manovich describes a signal and how it can be modified by passing through filters. I increase the chance of alternative worlds by pasting different city landscapes on my background and adding filters as well as adjustments to play with its aesthetics. I also play with signal by projecting an animation overtop of the printed background. The projection will entail a little girl walking through the city landscape (the digital painting.) This piece plays with the idea that media objects can exist as a sum of its whole or as different versions, it contains the transition between material object to electronic signal as well as the transition to computer media from electronic signal.

 

Drawing from the reading Intermedia Stages of Virtual Reality in the Twentieth Century: Art as an Inspiration of Evolving Media by Oliver Grau; I will offer commentary on virtual reality by implementing this projection to realize dynamic, interactive images to create a new experience. The extrapolation of the animation will fuse the observer and image. The background becomes alive and perspective is added when a moving image integrates itself with a static piece.  I reduce the distance between analog and digital and thus the distance between the observer and image. The static background and then the projection of the animation allows a change in perspective that will create an illusion, a full experience: a virtual reality.

 

My aesthetics will draw on the idea of the sublime, and despite its vastness it will still bring delight and simple beauty within smoothness of the child’s tranquility and pace. Thus, will touch on ethics of culture and society within two different perspectives. I want to rescue the idea of time and space and pace in relation to the young female child and group of people indoctrinated within consumerist capitalism. So in a sense I will also also reference Vogue Italia’s Focus On: Alfredo Jaar 30 min video interview but mostly address Goddard’s notion that whether the artist chooses aesthetics or ethics, she arrives at the other as well. Ultimately I too wish to challenge our perception, force us to concede the pain of time and understand it is constructed, that we essentially race ourselves to death.

 

Basically I’m applying Lev Manovich’s copy and paste vs pixel and filter selection logic to question autonomy. Also, competing with perspective of the viewer by animating media to play over the landscape as a projection. I want to create illusion, but also have the viewer question time and roles. The gestures in wax on the printed digital painting will symbolize adult figures swooping through the city. Ultimately I want the viewer to acknowledge that both the group of adults and the little girl are a part of the same environment but -because of the adults’ constructed social norms and duties- function apart from each other. Therefore, the piece also invites viewer to question pace and the urgency in the adult world. Consider the elements used to acknowledge your sense of urgency and how it has developed over the years.