After my research, I found that I am very interested in screen or projected images interacting with human movements. So my project ideas will be around this general strategy of having an interactive screen. Furthermore, all my projects are centered on one general theme of human’s “blindness” online. The first project is about our blindness on fame, the second is about blindness on our own conducts, and the third is about our blindness on truth. These three projects would be relevant to all internet users since we have all participated or witnessed such phenomenons actively or passively.
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First, I want to build an interactive set up that reflects on the current trend of everyone wanting to be famous. I will call it “15 minutes”. As Andy Warhol once said that: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”(15 minutes of fame). The project would start off being a blank canvas, or with a natural looking background. When someone walks in the fame, eye-shaped icons will slowly appear in rows and the eyeballs will turn towards that individual standing in the frame. After a while, maybe around 30 seconds, those eyes will slowly fade away meaning that people have lost interest in that individual and are seeking new ones. Indeed, there are many ways for one to be famous nowadays with social media applications such as Tik Tok or Instagram. But rarely can someone sustain their fame . This project is aimed to emphasize that instead of wanting to get famous online, maybe we should rather focus on something else that makes our lives meaningful.
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For my second idea, I want to explore internet violence. It is called “Snowfall“. There will be a toy with a motion sensor in it. When someone punches it, there would be a snowflake coming down on the screen. As more people punch the toy, the snowflake would accumulate and eventually create an avalanche. I hope this project could signify that we normally ignore the impact of our actions. The toy represents someone on the internet who s being bullied. Instead of being on the internet, they would be shown in real life as puppets to show that we believe our actions do not actually have an effect on the person at the other side of the internet. Earlier this semester, news broke out that the K-pop star Sulli was found dead at age 25(Allen, 2019). This tragedy has made many people noticing the toxic online abuse scene that exists everywhere in the world. People described internet violence as snowflakes to avalanche, that all snowflakes are responsible for the avalanche. This project visualizes the seemingly harmless effects of individuals’ participation in online abuse.
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My third idea is about the idea of truth. I want to call it “Truth about Truth” or “In Eyes”. With this project, I want to emphasize how difficult it is to achieve the whole truth. The basic idea of this project is to have a blurred photo that is originally showing a very contrasted scene, such as a kid playing soccer on a green field, but outside of the field is a destroyed city. The whole picture would be blurred in the beginning, but as someone walks into the frame, the area where the person is standing will be the focus, or not blurred anymore. I want to show that we are seeing and interpreting things from our own perspective. We are seeing only what we want to see, and it is almost impossible to see the real picture at once and decide what is the truth. I got this idea while talking with my friends regarding the Hong Kong protests happening recently. The news we see in China and the trends on Twitter completely represent two opposite sides of the violence. People on both sides are only willing to read the news they believe are true. So the truth is always what they want to believe in. This is determined in media study as “selective exposure”(‘Selective exposure theory’, 2019) . The scary part of selective exposure is the “third-person effect”. We have a tendency to think that we are not easily influenced by the internet as individuals.
References:
Allen, F. (2019) ‘K-Pop star Sulli found dead at 25 after online abuse forced her to quit band’, The Sun, 14 October. Available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10130043/sulli-dead-25-k-pop-singer-korea/(Accessed: 15 November 2019).
15 minutes of fame – Wikipedia(no date). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_minutes_of_fame(Accessed: 14 November 2019).
‘Selective exposure theory’ (2019) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Selective_exposure_theory&oldid=925657827(Accessed: 15 November 2019).
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