COFA 1002 Assessment 2 Statement and Bibliography
1. The question of what constitutes the ‘human’ is an enduring one. Art and design often respond to this question by exploring relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. Considering material, social, political, cultural, legal and technological issues, how can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?
The question of what constitutes human is a complex and ultimately redundant one. The common element in the various definitions of ‘human’ is sentience; having emotion, thinking and feeling like ‘humans’ do. But this requirement cannot be fulfilled for the simple reason that it is impossible to truly tell whether or not another being thinks and feels as you do. Everyone is isolated within their own mind and because of this it is impossible to tell if others think and feel the same way you do. Thus humanity is not and cannot be about sentience and emotion. So in that case, is humanity about communication? In a sense it is, after all if an entity can communicate to others as if it is human then it may as well be, for how would we know otherwise? But this still does not answer the question of what is ‘human’; being human is more than just a matter of being able to lie well enough to pretend that you are a human being. After all one person may believe such a lie while another may not. Hence ‘humanity’ is all a matter of perception. Every person has their own view on what is human and what isn’t, what is human to one person may not be to another. I am attempting to illustrate this concept in my artwork by taking the generic symbol of a human - a human face - and distorting it in stages until it is ‘human’ no longer. The exact point at which a non-human objects becomes recognisable as human as well as the point at which a human face becomes unrecognisable as human is up to the viewer to decide, because ultimately there is no answer for what constitutes a human. It is all a matter of perception and opinion. For my first work I took a mould of my own face in plaster and cast it four times, also in plaster. I then sanded two of the casts and filled the air holes and deformities in with white clay, I then primed these two casts with a layer of white paint. The third cast as simply left as it was, straight out of the mould and the fourth I tried to distort as much as possible using a chisel, while retaining the basic shape of the face. I took one of the faces I had primed and painted it to match human skin as much as possible, I then stuck false eye lashes on the eyes and cut up some more false lashes to create eyebrows. This work is an attempt to test at which point an inanimate object - in this case a lump of plaster - can pass for human, whether full facial features and skin colour are needed or if simply basic shapes with suffice. For my second work I took photos of various people - friends and family - and incrementally distorted them until they lost all resemblance to the person they once were. This work’s aim is similar to the previous only instead of testing when something non-human becomes human it is a test of when a human becomes non-human. There is no concrete answer to any of these works, you may find all representations to be human, or you may find none of them human as, after all, they are just sculptures and pictures, not real people. They cannot think or feel, at least as far as you can tell. The goal of my work is to make you question how much you really know and understand about the people you see. You can see a face and read the emotions on it, you can hear a voice and discern the meaning in it, but all of this is merely your perception of people. You will never really know whether the emotions on that face are the same ones you feel, or if those emotions are real at all. You will never know if the message in those words is the one the speaker really meant. We are limited by our perception, by our ability to tell truth from lies, and this in turn makes it impossible to say what ‘human’ really is.
Dewey-Hagborg, H. (2013). Trace Recordings. Retrieved from http://art.uts.edu.au/index.php/exhibitions/trace-recordings/
In this work a group of artists from the University of Technology Sydney took DNA samples from various items (cigarette buds, gum, etc.) found in public places and used them to recreate the face of the person that DNA belongs to. This work shows just how malleable ‘human’ really is, how the human image can be reconstructed in full from the smallest of pieces.
McKone, E. (2008). The Cognitive and Neural Development of Face Recognition in Humans. Canberra: School of Psychology, Australian National University.
This report about early facial recognition in infants was very interesting and provided a basis for the idea that humans are best symbolised with a face. This study showed that infants only 9 minutes old were able to distinguish which paddle (out of a choice of three) has a human face on it. This article provided the inspiration for using human faces to represent humanity in general in my artworks.
Piccinini, P. (2009). Evolution. Retrieved from http://www.artgallery.wa.gov.au/education/documents/TMAG-Piccinini-EVOLUTION-interpretive-resource.pdf
Patricia Piccinini’s work was a great source of inspiration for me when creating this artwork. Piccinini makes silicon sculptures that resemble humans enough to be disturbing and to inspire empathy but not enough to look truly human. This odd balance between human enough to inspire empathy and yet clearly not human was very interesting to see and prompted to try and find that point at which something is both human and not.
Taylor, A. (2013). The Hyperrealistic Sculptures of Ron Mueck. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/10/the-hyperrealistic-sculptures-of-ron-mueck/100606/
Ron Mueck was another artist that I drew inspiration from. He creates very life-like silicon sculptures of unconventional subjects; pregnant women, new born babies, very old men, etc. What makes these sculptures unique it not just the incredible level of detail and realism but also the scale of the works. Almost none of the works are life sized, they are their enormous or tiny. This experimentation with scale shows how much our perception of a human body is changed by a single element, the viewer feels threated by the larger sculptures, even if their posture is distinctly non-threatening, and superior to the smaller sculptures.
romaincrisis
gamechangershow
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines