Assessment 3 – Final Artworks Combined (representation) Concept Statement
Digitally Consumed.
What do we sacrifice in becoming a digitalized citizen?
Throughout Assessment 3, I used different forms of technology to explore methods of erasure. Reproduction, repetition, failure, chance, editing and vagueness were all methods I experimented. I discovered how the quality of something is diminished after repeatedly being digitally or mechanically reproduced… to the point of the original being lost entirely through the reproduction. But what would happen if the ‘original’ being technologically reproduced were the ‘human’?
Through my work I am demonstrating the effects of being progressively replicated in a digital form with the focus being on the human existence. We are constantly representing ourselves through digital reproductions of the original, being conceived through a medium, which is completely unnatural. We are consumed and immersed within technology, technology is becoming our lives and our lives are becoming technology.
Everything needs to consume to live, have an existence or survive. Trees need soil, cars need fuel, bees need pollen and computers need power. What does technology need to exist? Humans? We created technology to enhance our lives, evolve, make things easier and in some senses ‘play god’… but have we gone too far? We feel we have control, enhancing, advancing, inventing and solving new problems that were created by the old problems. But is technology the one to be ‘playing god’? Humans invented technology… but is technology now inventing us? Are we being digitally consumed?
For my 3 final artworks I have used 2 visual media clips and 1 sound clip to demonstrate the process of becoming an absorbed digital entity. The artworks have been designed to be viewed as one work but consisting of 3 elements that together reinforce the methods used within the production (or reproduction). Viewed as one, the work conveys a distorted and diminishing conscience, edging closer to something unknown, the sound representing this transformation as digitally infused heartbeats that eventually dissipate into the void.
