Ellie Wilkinson

CONCEPT STATEMENT:

My project explores and questions the negative relationship between humans and technology, how it will effect the human race in the future and how we are ultimately becoming technological zombies who are destroying our own personal, interactive and communicational skills for a tiny electronic device that is nothing but a materialistic object in our life. My main aim for my final project was to force the viewer to address their own negative contribution with technology and awaken them to realise that we as individuals play a major role in this disturbing decline of physical human interaction. Through research and experimentation I explored into the ideas of how humans are starting to solely focus on whether they are getting enough likes on Instagram or if they are posting the right statuses or images up on Facebook and not taking time to develop and strength our skills to interact with other human beings. We as humans are basically shutting ourselves off from each other and becoming highly involved with technology and if we are not willing to stand up and take action for this, the path we are steering for ourselves is a very haunting and miserable image.

My project originally generated from the question of “The question of what constitutes the ‘human’ is an enduring one. What are the limits (physical, social, political, cultural, legal, etc.) of a human subject? In our contemporary moment, what is the relationship between the human subject and non-human agencies and technologies?’. I viewed this to be challenging the broad question of if the human race is actually developing a ‘better world’ with technology or are we slowly developing a technological dystopia. I therefore questioned if we as humans will benefit by halting the rapidly development of technology and stay where we are right now in present time.

My final project “Blurring Existence” seeks to explore the idea of how we are limiting ourselves as humans both physically and mentally because we are so fixated on desiring a perfect human for all the wrong reason. In our modern world we see the ‘perfect’ individual as someone who is faster, smarter, stronger but we only see this happening if we use technology to get there. This technological human being we vision is weakening our abilities and by solely believing we will only be able to achieve this goal through the merge of the human and robot is a very depressing one. I conducted a survey that gathered some very disturbing information, I asked the question “have you ever hid behind your phone/computer/ipad or some other form of technology to avoid talking or interacting with other” and 76% of people said yes. And then I asks if “after taking this survey, would you decrease your usage of technology” and 80% said no. This was very interesting because it displays that people are willing to admit to using technology in a bad way but then not wanting to change into a more positive relationship with technology.

 My first experiment was influenced by the first weekly topic, desire. I looked at the connection between desire and technology and from there I explored how we are all so wrapped up on being popular and noticed on social media that we are distorting and manipulating our own identity. As a result people start to view us different and develop a clouded, false judgment of whom we truly are. From this concept I played around with the image of the apple ‘cloud’ and how our minds are clouded through this false image we create of ourselves on the Internet. I juxtaposed with the pun of the apple ‘cloud’ against the seriousness of this negative relationship we are in with technology and from this I saw this idea of loosing our real identity as an opportunity to dig deeper. I saw the human fingerprint as one of the main symbols that represent everyone’s individual identity. Therefore my final video, “Blurring Existence” and artwork, “our new fingerprint” expresses how our relationship with technology is making our true identity as a person disappear through the false image we create for ourselves on social media and how we as humans are slowly merging with technology and loosing our whole human identity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 1: YouTube, (2014). Look Up. [online] Available at: http://youtu.be/Z7dLU6fk9QY [Accessed 13 Sep. 2014].

  2: wonderful, s. (2014). OMOTE / REAL-TIME FACE TRACKING & PROJECTION MAPPING. [online] Vimeo. Available at: http://vimeo.com/103425574 [Accessed 13 Sep. 2014].

3: BrandSynario, (2014). Human or Robots? Japan Has Created Shockingly Human-Like Robots. [online] Available at: http://www.brandsynario.com/news/human-or-robots-japan-has-created-shockingly-humanlike-robots [Accessed 13 Sep. 2014].

  4: Sugimotohiroshi.com, (2014). Hiroshi Sugimoto. [online] Available at: http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com [Accessed 13 Sep. 2014].

THE friends and family of a Dutch student watched with envy on Facebook as she posted pictures of her South East Asia adventure.

FINAL PROJECT:

“Blurring Existence” 

In my final project I wanted to express the tangled interrelationship between humans and technology how we use our phones constantly in our every day lives and our human print gets printed onto the screen. Although through constant use and different finger movement our finger print gets smeared and becomes unidentifiable. Therefore i wanted to show the smearing of our finger print/individual identification through placing paint on my thumbs and then using my phone like usual. 

RESEARCH AND INSPIRATION:

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO:

Theatres

In 1978, Sugimoto's Theatres series involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins with a folding 4x5 camera and tripod, opening his camera shutter and exposing the film for the duration of the entire feature-length movie, the film projector providing the sole lighting. The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects that register owing to the long exposure of each photograph, while the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.

MY VIEW:

I took Hiroshi's work to explore how we are entertained by going and watching a new released movie at the cinema. When you break it down to its core, we are basically going and watching a screen for around 2 hours. We are fixated on technology and find it as a way of entertainment.

I believe Hiroshi is capturing the idea that we are wasting our precious time away by watching a screen. And the way he portrays this is by using a long exposure shot that displays a blank screen but in actual fact has captured the entire film.

Therefore the concept behind it is that we are watching nothing. We take nothing good from it. its only a way of entertaining us for a short period of time and nothing more.

I conducted this survey to ask the questions of how dominate is our negative value towards technology. I focused on looking into social media and our everyday usage of technology and it is interesting to see clear aspects of how technology is most defiantly too important in our everyday lives and it will eventually lead us into a highly technology influenced future if it hasn't already.

INTERESTING FACTS

- 16 out of 25 people admitted that they hid behind some sort of technology to avoid interacting and communicating with others. This shows that humans are already shutting themselves off from physical interaction and using technology in a negative way. 

- BUT then when asked if they were going to decrease the time they spent on technology 80% of people said no : which concludes that people are not willing to make a positive change and would rather stay in a bad habit of relying and using technology to much.

EXPERIMENTS IN CLASS: WEEK 7: VALUE:

- In class this week we explored the topic of value and asked the questions of what is value and how do we judge how valuable art and design is. 

- using the university and immediate surrounding area as your site, work in groups to produce a series of mini experiments that capture the value of the build and social environment of cofa

- With this experiment i focused on values from the question i am investigating for assignment 2. and this is the topic of technology.

- Therefore i made a mind map and explored what kind of technology was based around campus. and i started looking into tangible and intangible values of technology.

EXPERIMENTATION: CONTEXT AND TIME:

- I am focusing on time of the future in these experiments. After researching and being influenced by omote/real-time face tracking and projection mapping: the collaboration between japanese media artist, Nobumichi Asai and makeup artist Hiroto Kuwahara. And also drawing influence from Japanese robotic expert Hiroshi Ishguro and his overly realistic human like robots my experiments are questioning:

RESEARCH:

Project omote is a collaboration between japanese media artist  Nobumichi asai, make up artist hiroto Kuwahara. Omote projects computer graphics onto the human face and has trained the projection to recognise a model's face and follow her as she moves. 

Omote to follow the person's face as it moves and adapt its projections accordingly is a huge development for the system. Essentially, Omote can be viewed as electronic make-up, with the ability to project practically anything on a person's face

.........................................................................................................

EXPERIMENTS IN CLASS:

WEEK 6: CONTEXT AND TIME:

- OPTION TWO: FINDING AND LOCATING YOUR DESIRES VIA EXISTING PRECEDENTS 

- Use sticky-notes - on each note - write down a single example of an actual art/design/media object or experience. Make sure

-  list the name of an actual object/artwork/design - something you have experienced directly - or vicariously via the media

- Pick five of your favourite objects/experiences - and analyse each example using the table below. Enter descriptions into each.

My mind map starts to branch of the negative expectations of the relationship and merge of humans and technology: - Some negative side effects from technology for humans are

1 - Decrease of jobs; robots are replacing jobs for humans because it is ultimately cheaper.

2 - Lack of Physical Interactivity 

EXPERIMENTATION: DESIRE 

Through exploring the idea of what desire is in class. I started to look into how desire is involved within our assignment and the relationship it has with how humans are limiting themselves through technology.

This experiment explores the idea how we are all so absorbed in our iPhones and our desire and obsession to be popular and noticed on social media that we will sometimes twist our words and updates to become more appealing to others and therefore our true judgement of others becomes clouded. 

I therefore started to experiment how i could portray this idea through the human face. 

I took to photoshop and started to play around with distorting the face so that it was still recognisable but had changed a considerable about to expressed the idea of how the internet can create a fake world that we decide to believe.

EXTENDING ON FROM ASSIGNMENT 1:

so question number 2: asks the question if humans are limiting themselves with technology and ! believe this is a great video/campaign that explores this concept.

Our world is rapidly evolving and we as humans are becoming increasing involved in this 'online communication' where we can talk, interact and post pictures of our every day lives without even having to come into physical contact with anyone.

2. The question of what constitutes the ‘human’ is an enduring one. What are the limits (physical,

social, political, cultural, legal, etc.) of a human subject? In our contemporary moment, what is the

relationship between the human subject and non-human agencies and technologies? Art, design

and media respond to these questions in the form of works that explore humanness. Considering

concepts such as those in Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, investigate the possibilities for the