SILICON FUTURE by Evan Pan
The concept of my Diptych revolves around the contrast between the present and the cyberpunk future that awaits us. Recently, I finished Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime set in the not-so-far future, where mega-corporations dictate every aspect of daily life. The denizens of the sci-fi environment–Night City–are equipped with all sorts of cybernetic enhancements, with a lot of them more metal than human. Everyone is judged based on the extent of their cybernetic enhancement and whether they work for a mega-corporation or not. People are revered for what they owned and casted out if they own very little. Long story short, in the future, the things that we own end up owning us. This is the central theme of SILICON FUTURE. The motorcycle that the girl owns in the picture ends up replacing her in the seemingly vibrant future. In the constant race for progress, humanity and compassion (represented by the teddy bear and the girl holding it) are slowly being traded for innovation and globalization, and we may entirely be replaced by our creations one day.
I needed three elements in my life-sized still-life to convey my main theme: the element of humanity, the element of materialism, and a wide empty space that has great potential to showcase the “benefits” of innovation and globalization. I decided that my female accomplice (with one of her many stuffed animals) would make a great representation of humanity with her soft yet hopeful appearance. Recently I have invested in an electric motorbike, and it brings me great joy, to the point where it became an obsession for a little while. I have spent too much time in the past three weeks researching electric motorcycles and the different modifications that I could make to mine and I feel that the electric motorbike has taken so much of my time and my resources that it might own me instead one day. I decided that was a good representation of materialism. For the backgrounds, I found a bridge on the way to school with a view of the river and a skyscraper in Puxi. I felt this was the perfect spot to stage my shot because it already had hints of a cyberpunk future, yet there was still so much more to be filled into the spaces between the sci-fi-esque buildings. I did different shots, both in the night and the day to fill up my contact sheet with elements I can use for the project. The original image was going to be in the day while the edited image was going to use my night shots.
Creating the image was a creatively enlightening process as I learned so much more about photoshop. The first step was to isolate as many elements as possible, such as the electric motorcycle, the girl, and the many shots of sci-fi-esque buildings that I took. Then, I swapped out the day backdrop to night and began working on the back-midground first, which was the skyscrapers, the future. I used photos of buildings that were colorfully lit and progressive in architecture as a way to showcase the bright future that consistent innovation may provide for us. This was the “juice” of the project as it had a lot of elements to be implemented into, so I did it first in order to make the placement process more precise. Then I did the foreground, which was the bridge barrier and the motorcycle. The girl and her stuffed animal has been taken completely out of the picture in order to represent what we might have to trade in the name of progress. Instead, all that is left is what the material object that ended up owning her. To further reinforce this idea, I created a background using just pictures of the motorcycle, which in all honety, had a evil feel to it. Placing the idea of materialism in the foreground and the background gives the effect of “surrounding” and “foreboding” which is exactly the effect technology has on us right now. This effect will be far more physical than we would like in the future. As the piece has a lot of intermingling elements, I applied an afterglow outline in order to better separate everything. I colored the city blue to show the bright side of progress, and the motorcycle elements purple to further accentuate the feeling of being trapped.
If I could have done anything differently it were to capture more photos of futuristic buildings in order to have the effects of progress appear more convincing and grandiose in scale.
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