And so the research begins...
I decided to split this process into smaller ‘blocks’ to distinguish between ideas, hoping to gradually form a unique body of experimental work (involving practice-based works too).
The first ‘block’ is based on my findings from entering the first key term ‘Society’ into the ‘tate.com’ search bar. The result was shockingly extensive to choose from, and so I went through them in the descending order to keep my options open, instead of disregarding that which does not attract me at first glance as I usually do.
The first piece of work I came across was J.M.W Turner’s ‘Modern World’ (specifically referencing ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ documented below) - I would usually overlook pieces that seemed ‘pre-2000′s’ in appearance but I am glad that this activity forced me to do otherwise. For me, it was the unexpected detail of the train in the painting that transformed my previous opinion - the more we zoomed in, the more history the piece revealed, and surprisingly mid 1800′s society was not that far off today’s in the technological manner. We are still in the mentality of producing the most powerful robots, whether it’s in the form of cars or architecture - the ‘obsession’ has not stopped (and I don’t think ever will).