Assessment 2 - Artist Concept Statement
My final work is a collage of images composited together using Photoshop. It is a representation and exploration of what will happen once underwater housing as viable real estate becomes mainstream (excuse the pun). The house, along with the objects within and surrounding it, show the different things we value in society that are associated with the setting of the home: shelter, food, comfort, security (for intrinsic valuables and prized possessions, as well as from attack), time and family. This piece is an exploration of the future situation where we are forced to change where we keep and associate with the things and parts of our lives that we value. Instead of having access to these things in the way we have access to them now (in a normal current day living situation), they will be placed into a foreign and unknown environment but we will still have a desire to value them in the same way.
As I started my preliminary research for this assessment, I thought of all the different ways that humanity would have to live if we were in different environments (physically possible or not).
What if we lived in the sky and had to fly down to Earth to explore it? What if we lived under the ground and couldn’t go on the surface or we would fall off? What if we had to migrate as a species around the globe every year like some other animals? What if large scale meteor showers were a common occurrence and we had to avoid them? What if the mountains and valleys changed size rapidly?
These were the kinds of questions I was asking myself about how humans would relate to and live in all these sorts of situations. I finally decided to pursue a question I had about colonising the oceans if we were to run out of land or wanted better locations. It turns out that Ray White pitched the idea of someone buying Sydney’s first underwater house as an April Fools Day prank earlier this year, so it must at least be believable as an idea somewhere close in the future. Also, it could present a possible solution for Sydney’s housing crisis; with the cost of buying a house constantly growing, it’s becoming harder and harder to afford real estate. What if new land was released as underwater properties? Well, this is the situation that my final work seeks to address, particularly in the transfer of things we value in the home to a foreign environment.
During the construction of this work, a number of different changes were made to the various images used to better communicate the overall message. The family is placed in the centre of the house as one of the main focal points to show its central nature to the concept of the home; the place where the whole family lives and dwells together when they’re not out in the outside world. The house has a different texture and is not infiltrated by bubbles to show that it’s designed to be separate from the environment around it, although this idea is countered by the other objects surrounding it being immersed in the water and with bubbles around them. The underwater landscape was also slightly desaturated to better emphasise its foreign nature.
After completing this project, I believe it is a successful exploration of the original research question chosen in Assessment 1, as well as the weekly concept of Value that we discussed in class. After looking at other different ways in which I could have represented the concept, I think that this was the most viable for my situation and skillset, although I recognise that other approaches would have been effective as well. However, my idea before finally deciding on this one was to build a watertight model house and display it in some sort of tank full of water, which while that would have been cool and an interesting proof of concept, after receiving feedback I decided to go with this more conceptual approach instead.
Tilbury, A. (2018). Peek inside Sydney’s first underwater house. [online] Ray White. Available at: https://www.raywhite.com/peek-inside-sydneys-first-underwater-house/ [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].
Coote, G. and James, M. (2018). Essential workers leaving Sydney because of housing crisis, report finds. [online] ABC News. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-05/sydney-housing-crisis-essential-services-pressure-workers-leave/9397818 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].
Devine, A. (2018). Record migrant arrivals spur home shortage. [online] NewsComAu. Available at: https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/sydney-nsw/sydney-struggling-to-house-record-number-of-migrants-after-nsw-population-grows-by-123k/news-story/bdc11c00f1424d9f0dcc491b6d8b77d0 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].
NewsComAu. (2018). Inside Sydney’s first underwater house. [online] Available at: https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/sydney-nsw/sydneys-first-underwater-house-sells/news-story/03158bfb5e944f95508e00b9bf910d06 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].