Eugenie (Yu Hsuan) Hsueh
Timea Tihanyi
Art 260 2016 Autumn
Module 2: Superdelegate to the Future
For this digital collage, my focus is to raise awareness of where we currently stand in terms of population growth, in terms of economic growth, and in terms of technology growth. I composed my scene as a dystopia-to-be, using color and composition to create what it will feel like in a society that is slowly turning into a dystopia.
Using a gray-toned color, it brings out the dullness of the city, and the gloomy feel of what people are feeling. The perspective from where the teenage boy is standing shows what it’s like below the bridge and what it’s like living in that city. Every space in the piece is occupied by buildings, by cropping out the building background my group supplemented me with, I copied and pasted the cropped image multiple times to create a crowded city. Based on the perspective, I scaled up the buildings in the front and made the buildings further behind smaller, and by piling them in different orders, I was able to create my city background, and as the bridge goes on, it blends in with the background and disappears into the city. With the cars on the highway, I also made it at different scales to show what distance they’re at and also to display how tight and packed everything is in that city I created.
Influenced by Robert Morris and Mark Dion, I wanted my work to act as a reflection of the world we live in today. In both of their art work they talk about reflections either through the mind or in person, Glass Labyrinth by Robert Morris is a piece of work for people to see their own reflections while seeing others, and Mark Dion’s Landfill calls upon people to notice the damages we created. While our cities may not be as crowded as the city created, we are overpopulated in a lot of cities and in some, we end up just living in cubes, apartments, and caring only about ourselves and not of others. We became somewhat isolated, and dependent only on technology.
As the population grows, we build more and more cubes for people to live in, we develop technologies so that people can live an easier life, but all we care about is about how much money we will be making. In today’s society, we pay a lot of attention to where the technology is at and not where our relationships with others is at. We rely on computers, on devices, and even robots; we write emails, we tweet, we post, but we don’t talk face to face. Spinning off on Senga Nengudi’s work, “Nuki Nuki” that talks about fragility, I wanted to bring people’s attention to the fact that we are piling things, one after another, and we never do know when it will fall apart, when everything will just come crumbling down.
In my work, the alien as the antagonist, represents both the future and the consequences of human; while the teenager as the protagonist, represents us, the millennials that are rising to take up the responsibilities, to protect the place we call home. This is important to me, as a millennial, what we do now will be affecting us later on, and it’s important to know that the damages that we’ve done cannot be undone. I want people to think, deep down, what they feel about the society, about the environment, about this place they call home.
