Digital Sessions Final + Artist’s Statement (Trigger Warning)
This project deals with suicide and related themes, however, I am by no means suggesting that I want to commit suicide or that anyone should.
“You’re seriously radiating small-dick energy and need to grow the fuck up” - is the last thing I read directed at me before finishing this project. This was a reply to my comment on a post I found biased or unfair, and despite respectfully explaining that it wasn’t okay, I was met with a lot of hate, unreasonable rudeness and quite frankly, bullying, even from the kind of people I was trying to defend. This hurt me more than it should’ve, coming from a stranger who knows nothing about me or my intentions. It was he final push to me deciding to delete social media where I mainly wanted to post and share my art. I don’t feel that it’s worth all that anymore.
This whole term has been very struggling emotionally, especially, coincidentally with this term’s theme of the digital world. On the one hand, it provides an amazing range of escape from reality, and on the other it can drag you into a deeper hole of self hate and confrontation. I spend time, daily, drowning myself in wholesome memes, cat video compilations & useless life hack tutorials on the internet to try and drown out the crime, abduction and rape news I’m confronted with... on the internet. So you can see where the irony lies, and this is what I’m trying to focus on with the project. - The helpful & harmful, amazing & awful, good & bad side of the digital world.
Simply put, for the positive, I used bright colors for the overall color scheme. Pure whites, pastels, pinks, baby blues, as well as anime references which is a big love of mine and has a very big supportive community. I used a character from the Doki-Doki Literature Club game - A cute, energetic, positive girl. The whole combination of those as well as the imagery of a body hanging makes the scheme feel overly sweet, like you could vomit jut looking at it but it’s so aesthetically pleasing at first, you’re not sure how to feel and whether to like it or not. It’s like that or me at least. I revisited the idea of vomit with the code leaking from the ceiling. It’s overflowing and chunky.
The negative parts were more personally inspired. This whole term I’ve been struggling with emotion, self-worth, and just general feelings of “I’m not good enough”, “my work’s not good enough”, “I should keep quiet”, “no one actually cares what I think”, “I’m just gonna be scolded”, etc. I’m a rational mind with no history of mental illness, but I haven’t been able to escape these thoughts and feelings. So I went with the theme of giving up, because that’s what I often feel like doing. I want to give up reasoning with irrational people, I want to give up explaining myself when I’m not listened to, I want to give up trying to get a long with people when they show disrespect toward me without me actively provoking them. So I went with suicide for this project. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of giving up.
You can only have a love-hate relationship with the digital world.