Project 1 - Filtered Reality
This project is a sculpture that I created out of clay. The
idea spawned out this frightening tidbit of information that I heard about a
ridiculously high percentage of FOX NEWS viewers still to this day believe
that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of 9-11. Ultimately
Truth is absolute and is not subject to interpretation. But truth which exists
within the minds of the people is rarely the absolute Truth that they so
adamantly believe it to be. The basic concept has to do with the fact that
there are basically six media conglomerates through which reality frequently
passes through before reaching the people. Our five senses simply do not have
the scope to reach the level of information acquisition that the use of
technology has enabled. Unfortunately the technologies and the content are
subject to manipulation for which people all to often do not take into
account. Even the internet is becoming a new frontier for further development
of the facade of freedom and reality with powerhouses like NewsCorp buying
Myspace and Google buying out YouTube. The best system of control is truly the
illusion of freedom.
So the design of the sculpture is intentionally made from
clay because Adam was made from the earth... from clay. I felt this medium
would accentuate the character representation of mankind in general. The
sculpture is finished with a glossy acrylic except for the universe that is
within the mask because I wanted the artificiality of this illusion of reality
punctuated with a dull, dead feel. The
character is still grounded to these roots and is meant to be portrayed as
part of this tangible, biological plane. A suggestion was made that I have the
character have a chair on which he rests, but the connotation there would
imply to me that the person is being lazy or apathetic about their knowledge
acquisition. That was NOT what I wanted to convey because intelligent,
diligent, well-informed people are still subjected to various forms of media
conglomerate filtration. The character is both holding onto and pushing
the face of the media from him which symbolizes dependence on the
media, but also a distance or doubt that media projected world
is as reliable as he wants it to be. His head is tilted in a fashion that
portrays a desire to break free from this dependence, yet the inability to
look away from the universe as it is projected to him through the media. The
state of convergence and filtration is imminent and the most intelligent
people I've met are the ones that know they don't KNOW but still do everything
they can to gain the most realistic world perspective possible. As the island
of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
"If you don’t read the newspapers you are uninformed - if you do read the newspapers you are just misinformed.” -Mark Twain
