Can You Show Me Something Real, Today?
This body of work is my response to the changing nature of human interaction, the volume increase of representations at play in society and the generational shift towards a life where the digital life may occupy more ‘real’ time than ‘real’ life.
A moment in time when the replica becomes the primary real.
The time children (8+) spend using electrical gadgets has risen dramatically in recent years because portable devices have revolutionised the way children access internet, TV, films and music.
By using more than one device at a time – such as iPads, mobile phones and games consoles – some youngsters are consuming up to 10 hours of electronic content a day.
Researchers found that youngsters devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes using 'entertainment media' across a typical day, an increase of 1 hour 17 minutes since 2004. Because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’, they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those seven and a half hours.
This led me to comment on the culture of the social media generation; self-publishing intimate slices of personal life, broadcasting imagery through the ‘share’ medium. I am interested in observing this cultural exchange of sharing, voting, trolling, liking, hating – the immediacy of capture and broadcast, comment and response. Witnessing the users’ modified values and behaviours – seeing new language and codes developing to fit this play cloud.
I consciously made ambiguous, reductive images from the home movies, utilising shallow depth and random panning to create a sequence of opportunities for my stills to capture ‘a sense of a person’ from the image on the tv.
The critical theme is to illustrate the absence of intimacy in the screened mages, an invasion of private space, a voyeuristic rendition of the human form.