Crime and Social Media

I’ve always been a supporter of social media sites, probably ’cause I caught the myspace craze right when this whole mess started, and have been riding the wave ever since. But, I’m also a supporter of intelligence, and in the context of social media, intelligence translates to knowing how to use the site/program you are using well enough to cover your ass. I’ve found myself (nearly) ranting about this a lot lately, especially in discussions in my blogging class (there’s a lot more ranting going on in my head – I’m not much of a talker in class, but moving on).

There are a great deal of people out there (it’s becoming more and more apparent to me) that are afraid of the potential power of social media. Your facebook might be searched by a potential employer, and those pictures of your drunken shenanigans might cost you a job. Your Twitter post might get picked up by a professor, employer, family member (whoever you don’t want reading your status update). Your foursquare account might reveal your whereabouts to potential stalkers or robbers. It’s dangerous, out there on the internet – everyone is trying to take advantage of you (thanks a TON scamville). And yet, it somehow rarely occurs to these social media nay-sayers that perhaps the solution is intelligent use.

I’m bringing this up because, while on my quest for a new car in Pittsburgh this weekend, I heard an announcement on a radio station that a new site, pleaserobme.com, is posting updates about when people are away from their houses based on status updates primarily from foursquare, but possibly also from facebook and twitter. The radio announcer used this site as a warning against posting status updates to facebook, twitter, myspace, or foursquare – ’cause people can track you and rob you!
After checking into the site, though, the main point of pleaserobme.com is to raise awareness of the wrong way to use social media(what I shall henceforth call, the unintelligent use of social media).

Posting about how you feel, a project you’re working on, a cool quote you heard in a movie, etc. – while pointless to some, is intelligent use of social media. Posting your whereabouts is unintelligent, if you happen to live alone, or have a stalker (not many of us do, but some of the better narcissists made from the social media explosion would like to think they’re stalk-worthy, so I’ll leave the judgement on that one up to you individuals). Posting something like “At BAR, will be here till 3am, totally drunk, here’s some pics” is unintelligent use, and is possibly asking for it. On the one hand, the Internet is a very big place, and (despite what the social media narcissists will tell you) no one really gives a crap about anyone else. We might all just be too busy updating our status on facebook to go out in the world and rob your house. But, on the other hand… the average facebook user has 300+ (can’t remember the exact stat) friends – many have a lot more that that, to make up for losers like me who keep the friends count in the double digits. If your account is not secure and closed, anyone can follow you on twitter. Same goes for foursquare. Everyone on myspace is 14, so I’m not going to go into that one. People, it seems, do not lock down their personal pages. And if they do, they turn around and “friend” 600 random people – thus defeating the purpose of any page security in the first place. With all of those people out there, and alert to the fact that you’re away from home for x hours and sloppy drunk, there is a slight chance that you’ll get yourself robbed, attacked when you get home, killed, etc. (very slight – but let’s all be paranoid for a moment and think about this).

This becomes more of a problem when a site like pleaserobme.com shows up to show us all how stupid we’ve been acting, and provides info on our comings and goings to the general public – just like we have been doing. Some might say that the site should be shut down, that the folks at pleaserobme are promoting crime and stealing people’s information, but with that claim, we should all be shut down too. Looking at my facebook page, I can get information on my address, find out that I’m in a relationship someone and link over to his information, get my phone number, links to all the other sites I use, and information on what I’m doing at the moment via my status. That’s enough information for anyone to figure out how to rob me if I decide to post about being out of the house. HOWEVER! None of that information is available to the general public, and I’m a horrible shut-in with very few “friends” who can get to that info. This is the solution for those who fear social media related robbings, crimes, etc: get over your need for a false-sense of self importance, ditch the thousands of friends you don’t ever talk to, and learn how to use security features available to you on the social media sites you use. This will also keep your boss from finding all those embarrassing pictures of you.

Now, I understand that it’s mostly the facebook narcissists that are so afraid of someone tracking them down, and that this might end in a logic-loop, going back and forth between the need for self-affirmation through friends and the need to ditch those friends to keep your stalkers at bay. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do for those people. But, for the rest of us – who might fall into that trap from time to time, or just might not know any better. Be smart. The whole idea of social media is creating the possibility for individuals to talk to the world – so think about what you want the world to know before you post it, and if you don’t want the world to know, and still want to post it, well – security features are there for a reason.

Car Shopping

Earlier this week, my beloved boyfriend flipped my beloved car and while the boy is okay, the car is not. The physics of the crash on their own are quite fascinating (he managed to flip an excessively lowered honda civic equipped with sway bars, a feat in itself, and did this by lifting the front of the car, engine and all, up and over the back wheels, landing it on its roof without scratching the sides of the car at all) but what I’ve been finding this week is yet another amazing application for the internet, which I have never really had to use before – shopping. This is not your mother’s internet shopping either. I’ve been doing some intense information gathering on a ton of cars I’m looking into purchasing (well… making the boyfriend purchase). It really is amazing – the amount of information out there for anyone with the ability to type the word “google” into their browser.

I remember when I went shopping for my Civic – back when I was 17, recovering from the destruction of my first car (I pretty much blew it up) and in search of the ideal car (to a 17 year old, of course). I was pouring over auto trader magazines and classified adds, hoping to find something cool. I had my poor parents driving all over western Washington and parts of Oregon for the better part of three weeks, going out on test drives, getting a feel for what was out there, and getting some sort of idea of what a “good” car was. Ultimately, I decided on the purple civic with a super loud muffler and a bunch of modifications to the engine that I didn’t know anything about (at the time). In subsequent years, and with many a google search and a tuning forum, I discovered words like “sway bars” “cold air intake” “DOHC V-Tec” “Turbocharger” and, my personal favorite “Customization”, as well as what these things meant and how they worked in my car. I learned about what my car was capable of, what else could be done to it, and how to accomplish these projects. I was hooked, and I’ve loved fast cars ever since.

I never imagined giving up my Civic – I had some idealistic dream of handing it off to my kids one day, all tuned-to-shit and awesome. But, the time has come to replace it (Everyone keeps telling me my idea of chopping the portion of the roof that is compromised and turning it into a convertible is a bad idea) and I’m finding the Internet to be a better resource than I ever imagined. Beyond finding the best deal, which is very helpful, and finding maps on how to get to where that best deal is (even more helpful – I can’t even tell north from south out here for some reason) I’m able to take my somewhat limited knowledge of what to look for in a car and run with it. I’m checking up horsepower ratings, safety ratings (mostly for the boyfriend) consumer ratings, all that stuff. I’m getting into forums for custom tuning jobs and finding out which cars can be enhanced more easily than others, and how much the parts for such enhancements cost. All in all, I’m feeling like I have a pretty good idea about what I’m doing, what I want, and what I should get (pretty much settled on a Mini Cooper S, for those interested). And as an extra bonus, I know enough about the cars I’m checking out that when some pompous, sexist car salesman tries to tell me there’s a turbocharged engine in a car that looks completely stock, I can call him on it, and get a better deal.

So that’s been my week – shopping for cars and haggling. All thanks to the internet.

I’m old…

… or at least sometimes I feel old. I was out in Pittsburgh with my friend Boya today, doing some shopping for fancy new clothes for an AEJMC conference we’re attending, and while enjoying some of the finer foods available in the food court, we noticed a group of especially young-looking kids hanging out and playing with their cell phones. All of them seemed to have one, and each had it out, and was rapidly clicking away at it. Of course, Boya and I were astonished, and reminisced about our cell-phone free youth.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, kids have been making up more and more of the cell phone market for years, but with the recent rise of the smart phone, one has to wonder what exactly a 12 year old needs with a blackberry or an iphone. I report from Mashable makes this shift in consumerism even more interesting. According the the statistics they published, 75% of teens age 12 – 17 own cell phones. The report also suggests that 93% of teens in this age group are going online, and are more active in social networking sites than in sites dedicated to content creation, like blogs. This may explain what teens are using their cell phones for. Most phones sold today come with internet capabilities, text capabilities, and cameras. Some come with sound and video recording capabilities. It’s easier than ever to take a photo, go online, post it, and post a update to your social networking site of choice all on your phone, and this is likely why teens want these phones. Plus their friends have them. Plus they’re ‘cool’.

There are two questions I have, in relation to teens and phones: 1.) Where do they get all of this money? Last time I checked, a decent smart phone plan was upwards of $100 per month. I can’t even afford that bill (granted, I’m a student, so I’m not exactly wealthy, but still). It’s safe to assume these kids aren’t paying for these phones. Which leads me to question 2.) Do kids really need this much technology? If you’re in this age group, you’re supposed to be spending most of your time in school. Having taught 7th and 8th grade for one year, I know how much of a distraction a phone can be, and how inconvenient it can be to try to take them away. Parents throw fits when a teacher locks up an iphone in their desk drawer for a week. And rightly so – it’s an expensive gadget, and it’s 25% of a monthly bill completely lost. Even more so, it makes the parent actually have to keep track of their child – they can’t just call them and track them down. But what else is there to do? You have students posting to facebook instead of paying attention.

Another thing to consider, is how this will change the way future internet users actually use the internet. One could argue that with time, with knowledge, and with developed interests, the teens today may grow up to become the next generation of content-creators and follow in our footsteps, but old habits die hard. What may develop is a very limited understanding of what the internet has to offer (limited to facebook, myspace, shopping, and the occasional google map search) as well as the death of the blogosphere and with it the potential for a new take on public sphere communication. It’s hard to understand what the internet will be treated as for the generation of users who haven’t grown up without access, but it certainly shouldn’t be treated like a toy, as it is now (well, at least not as much, the internet can be a cool toy). That will come with education, especially on the responsible use of technology. Giving kids access to this as a treat, or a reward, or a form of allowance, is not the way to teach the younger generation to use technology – they don’t get any of the educational or informative benefits from the web, and they take all of the frivolous, sometimes meaningless crap that  is making the internet seem so small.

Art Vs. Photography

As part of my job as a graduate student at West Virginia University, I teach a section of a lab class on photoshop techniques. As part of the module, I incorporate a presentation on the ethics of photography, photo-journalism, and photo manipulation. I end up asking my students about where the line between ethical manipulation and unethical manipulation is drawn, and it seems to always land near the line between informative photography and artistic photography. As an amateur photographer as well as an artist, I tend to see it a bit differently.

I have problems with the term “fine-art photography” and “artistic photography”. True photography, for me, is a way of capturing a moment, a small flash, of reality. Good photographers have enough experience with the medium, and with the capabilities of their equipment, to understand how to make the reality they’re seeing appear on film in an artistic manner. A recent collection on The Big Picture blog featuring photos from India show how with just a camera and a creative photographer, a picture can be made artistic. Some of the photos are very artistic, some less so, and some are simply photos. And this is why I separate photography from art. Art, no matter how un-artistic it is, is art (just ask Bob Ross). A photograph can be artistic, but it’s always a photograph, and it is always somehow informative.

Technology complicates the matter. We now have digital art that can be made without any physical materials, or with a collection of materials including forms traditional art, photography, and digital media. This seems to be where the line between ethical and unethical manipulations as far as photojournalism goes lies. It becomes the line between photojournalism and advertisement photography, or other informative non-photojournalistic photography. In class, I bring up the famous Kim Kardashian photographs to point this difference. I try to stress that it’s not about her cellulite – it’s about the creation of an image that no longer represents reality. Programs like photoshop are taking a medium that is supposed to be a means to preserve moments from reality, and allowing users to turn such images into pieces of art by removing the reality from them.

I guess the point here is to stress the idea that what we take for granted as true may no longer be an actual representation of reality. I wonder if there are really any ethical ways to manipulate a photograph for journalistic purposes. The technology that accompanied photography always allowed for some manipulation – cropping, dodging, burning, etc – but when you can adjust the saturation of colors, increase contrast, spot heal any flaws that showed up in the image, are you really representing reality? Some would argue yes, that this technology merely allow us better ways to adjust for flaws in the equipment used to take the photo, to correct white balance, exposure, etc and create a better representation of what the situation really looked like, but then we are relying on a person’s perception of the situation, not the actual representation of the moment, and this falls into the realm of art, and out of the realm of photography. Call me a purist, but I almost feel that digital manipulations take photography from the medium of photography to the medium of digital art. It’s concerning, also, that so many student’s don’t recognize this. It’s always interesting to hear student’s responses (those that do respond, most choose to sit quietly and wait for me to give in and give them an answer) because so many are unsure what exactly the technology they’re learning is doing to the image, and are even more unsure of the actual value of a depiction of reality versus a manipulated version of that depiction. Perhaps it’s another effect of the digital age – but it makes teaching this sort of stuff nearly impossible.

Things to see when in Seattle for Pax

Being from Seattle, and being a bit of a geek, I have a deep love for the Penny Arcade convention, and have decided to provide for you a map of all the cool things to do in the area when in attendance at PAX.

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Seattle has a ton of awesome things to do. Part of why I love the city so much is because there is always something awesome to do, something cool going on, at all hours of the day (or night). From the convention center, where PAX takes place, its only a few short blocks to some of the best Seattle has to offer. A short walk west down Pike Pl. takes you right up to Puget Sound, and down into the famous Pikes Place Market. The Market has a good deal of tourist attractions, like the dudes that throw fish and the numerous flower vendors, but the real gems of the area are a little harder to find. There is an excellent comic books store deep in the lower levels of Pikes, that will keep you up on whatever manga, comics, etc you are reading. There’s also a magic shop (like magicians, not magic the gathering) and an excellent music store buried down there, so explore and check out all the little offshoot hallways.

Once on the street level at Pikes Market, you can also venture up into Post Alley. If your the kind of geek that has a good paying job, and if you didn’t blow all your money on classic comic books down at the comic store, you can find one of the best restaurants in Seattle there. The Pink Door is famous for it’s delicious food, but also has an amazing atmosphere. If you hold off on going here until Sunday, you can catch a trapeze show done right over your table while you dine. Be advised though, if you go looking for this place, pay close attention. There are no signs to let you know you’re there, it’s tucked away in the alley, and only marked by the pink door in the grey brick walls that make up the walls of the alley.

If you haven’t got enough of the gaming world during the hours PAX is open, you can head over to GameWorks, which is only one block west and one block north of the convention center. GameWorks, a multi-level arcade, is open late on the weekends, and after 10pm, becomes a 21+ only bar, with open access to the arcade. So if you don’t feel comfortable sneaking your flask into the con, you can still get your drunken guitar heroing on after hours. Gameworks is also located near the major shopping area in Seattle, Pacific Place, where you can take care of some fine, city-style shopping and dining before you head home.

Also, if you head south from Pike Place Market, you can hit the Seattle Art Museum. You may have to skip some of PAX so stop by, or schedule an extra bit of time before or after the convention, but there’s always something interesting on display. Walking through downtown Seattle, you’ll pass by tons of galleries, and you should pop in and check out what there is on display, but the SAM is a great place to see some world class art that you can’t usually find anywhere else.

So there it is, a guide to my home town, for those fellow geeks that may be headed out there this summer to check out the most awesome gaming convention ever (no, comic con. is not a gaming convention – so it doesn’t count). Or, hey, skip PAX and just go to Seattle – it’s an awesome city, with loads of innovative and interesting stuff  - from high tech to high art – to check out.

Blog-A-Day Week – Final Thoughts

Our class assignment this week has been to create a substantial post for our individual blogs on a daily basis, starting February 1st and continuing for a week. (The dates on my blog are slightly off, as the clock was set five hours ahead of eastern standard time, so most of the posts are one day off).

Initially, I thought this would be a difficult, time consuming task. I envisioned deep research, hours spend searching the web for just the right thing to write about, and then for more information about my topic to add to my post. But this was not the case at all. Starting from day 1, my posts developed quite quickly. I would find an article that seemed interesting on a different blog, think about the deeper meaning of that topic, then start writing. If I found that I needed more information, a quick google search for key words related to my subject was all that was necessary to round out my information.

I think this assignment has changed my outlook on exactly how big the Internet really is. For the past few years, I’ve used the Internet mainly to check my e-mail, facebook, and myspace (yup, still using myspace… I’m a loser) and occasionally do that ‘other stuff’ (signing up for classes, google-searching for information for school, and shopping, mostly). This behavior on my part developed a sense that the internet was shrinking – that less and less information was available as people were filtering into the major social media sites, and that the bulk of what was left after social media was reserved for commercial or academic purposes. Now I’m realizing this is simply not so. It is easy to fall into a routine where you use the Internet for only a few specific tasks, and simply stop thinking about everything else that is out there, but that doesn’t mean that is has disappeared, or that it is not being used by a large number of people. The ease with which I found fodder for my blog posts is a testament to this fact, and I came away from this assignment feeling like everyone, at some point, should attempt something like this, if only to better understand this tool that has become a part of our daily lives.

The many faces of Internet Technology

While poking through Mashable this evening, looking for something interesting to write about, I came across three posts that at first seemed completely unique, but after consideration, were all connected. The first as a post about Google’s first Super Bowl advertisement. The ad to fun, “Parisian Love” uses google searched to tell the story of a young man’s adventure in Paris. Each search marks a milestone in his live – finding the right study abroad program, finding the cafe where he meets a woman, wooing said woman, finding a job in Paris, getting married, and having a kid. The ad essentially shows the influence Google has on our lives. We get directions, find important places, and make important life decisions based on the information we gather from our google searches. I initially questioned the extent to which this was true, but then recalled how I figured out which university I would attend for graduate school (google search: Journalism Grad Schools).

The second post I came across was a bit more difficult to understand the importance of. It featured a twitter-powered popcorn popping robot. At first, all I could think was “how pointless, and what a brilliant way of developing a new meme”. Tell people that by typing in “popcorn” to twitter, they’ll make this cool little robot start making popcorn somewhere in the world, and that’s possibly all you will be seeing on twitter for the next few days. But, an invention like this is actually cool, at the conceptual level. It’s a way of physically measuring the popularity of something on twitter, and how effectively that thing is being spread across the internet. Whether anyone needs that much popcorn or not is a completely different question (I’m sure it can be turned off at some point) but the idea behind it is kind of remarkable. We can now measure the memes, and get a slightly better understanding of how well and how fast information is spreading. The machine made it to mashable already – and I hope, if it’s still connected, that the guys who made it have a nice stockpile of kernels to keep it running.

The third post was a bit more serious in nature. It discussed the Internet communications slow down (almost shut down) in Iran. Just days before a major protest against the Irani President is scheduled to occur, reports of slowed connections have been coming from the country. The Irani government blames a damaged cable (located conveniently at the bottom of the ocean) for the slow down, and claims that it will be repaired by the end of next week. Text messaging has also been disrupted in the country, which the government claims is the result of “changing software”. These developments are suspicious, to say the least, but are also indicative of the power of an Internet connection. The Irani government learned its lesson from the last major protests against the government, in which the information coming from the Irani citizens spread faster than the government could control. So now, it seems, the Internet has become something governments fear (or at least, is more feared than before – when we take China’s great firewall into account).

The power given to individuals connected to the Internet is the power for individuals to connect with the world. It could manifest itself in a trip to Paris, in a bowl of popcorn, or in global support of an oppressed people. All three of these posts point to one way in which individuals can use the internet to change the world they live in, and it seems, when you take a step back and look at everything that is going on, that despite the loss to human interaction, to face-to-face contact and conversation, that we are all really more connected than we really understand.

Snowed In

We had a lovely snowstorm blow through our area last night. After from getting stranded in a parking lot for three hours, tearing through a set of chains in an attempt to get up the hill out of the parking lot, and using obscenities I didn’t know were in my lexicon while yelling at some woman who decided to drive right up behind me as I was losing control of my car right after the chains broke, my boyfriend and I inched our way back to our house, and have been hiding here ever since. Spending a full day stuck inside my house is never an ideal for me, but since there’s over a foot of snow on the ground, and the branches of the trees in our yard are breaking off from the weight of the snow on them, it’s probably best to stay inside.

Naturally, all of this down time has given me time to consider the ways in which we occupy our time. I recall one instance from my childhood – it was a Girl Scout camping trip up to Big Bear, California. It was July, and we were expecting to grab a campsite, throw up some tents, swim, roast marshmallows, all that jazz – but the unthinkable happened, it snowed. Being summer, and being from the Mojave Desert, we were completely unprepared. It didn’t help that it also kept snowing – we wound up with close to a foot of snow in the town we were staying in. But, to the point: To stay occupied, we set up a “campsite” in a local business office that agreed to house us for the evening. We played games, busted out the guitar and sang songs, made crafts, told stories – even though we had access to TVs, VCRs, and rented movies (the popular technology of the time – I forgot to mention this was in the early 90’s). That was our snowed-in solution.

Today, I realiezed that for the most part, I have not been ‘logged off’ of the Internet. I haven’t even watched TV.  Using Netflix on-demand, hooked up to our TV via an X-Box 360, we’ve been downloading whatever we want to watch. When we get bored with that, we pop in a game and kill a couple of hours. If that’s not entertaining enough, I open up my laptop and bink around online to further occupy my mind. And I know that most of the other people living in my area are doing exactly the same thing, mostly because our connection speed has slowed to a crawl.

It seems as though it’s no big deal to be snowed in anymore. However, I wonder what would happen if we lost power at some point. We’ve become so accustomed to using these gadgets to keep ourselves busy, to the extent that we use multiple forms of technology just to keep ourselves fully occupied. Without a TV and an X-Box and on-demand video and laptops, what will we do? (the answer is, of course, play games on our iPhones until their batteries die – and then venture out to our cars to charge them again). The more I think about this, the more I realize we are never really disconnected anymore. Our tech has been developed beyond power outages and blizzards, or other extreme weather problems. But is this a good thing? Is it better to hang out with the people you’re with and play real games, to actually interact? I think of the typical TV plot, where the characters are snowed in or stuck in an elevator, or at home during a power outage, and over the course of the event they get to know each other better and come out feeling closer to that person, and I wonder, can that ever really happen anymore? Would anyone not bury themselves in their smartphone or laptop and wait it out? And if not, is that necessarily bad? We are, afterall, “connected” when we use this technology, maybe not to the person in the room with us, but to our friends on facebook, our mom who keeps calling for hourly updates on the weather (at least mine does, but my parents are Californians, they freak out every time the weather channel forecasts snow showers), and our faithful blog readers. Is the substitution of one type of connection for another really a bad thing – or just something different? More material to ponder while sorting out the meaning of all this new technology.

Nerdcore

My boyfriend and I have been getting geared up for our trip to PAX East (the east-coast version of Penny Arcade Expo) and, as with the Seattle version of PAX, we are looking forward to the nerdcore concerts than accompany the expo. Nerdcore is a relatively new genre of music that uses themes from all aspects of geekery (’cause “nerdery” just isn’t a word) in its lyrics and in the music’s construction. This genre is growing more and more popular, as songs from some of the more major nerdcore artists are finding their way into the mainstream, mostly through use in video games.

This sort of music seems to be indicative of the influence of technology in out lives. Jonathan Coulton is one artist in particular who uses his songs to illustrate how technology has infiltrated our everyday lives. Coulton’s song “code monkey” describes the mundane life of a computer programmer, stuck in his cubicle, flirting with receptionist, and secretly hating his boss. While humorous, it describes a work place that is becoming more and more of a reality for today’s workers. Other songs by Coulton draw from pop culture and video games for their lyrics while still integrating modern life into the subjects- “re: Your Brains” tells the story of a Zombie apocalypse survivor, hiding in a mall, trying to keep his now-zombie co-worker from consuming his brain,  and “Still Alive” describes the perspective of the homicidal computer from the video game Portal, which tries to kill its human test subjects after they complete a test of new technology for the Aperture corporation (yes, I am a little to familiar with the plot, but it’s an awesome game).

Other nerdcore artists, like Freezepop and MC Frontalot, use new technology to make their music. Frontalot stood out from the other nerdcore rappers with his innovative use of sound sampling (most which was initially pirated from online file sharing sources, but has more recently been obtained through legal channels, since he’s become internet-famous) coupled with geek-themed rap lyrics. Freezepop is notable for their use of the theremin (it’s wicked cool) in their pop/rock songs, and are one of the few bands to use this electronic instrument in their live shows (most sounds from the theremin are more easily generated by a synthesizer or programmed keyboard).

The growing popularity of these bands marks a change in the interests of music (aka media) consumers. More people are enjoying nerdcore songs, possibly because more people are able to relate to topics that were once deemed “geeky”. It marks a change in society, where those once exiled to the realm of geekery are now more acceptable, because the technology they used that marked them as geeks (video games, computers, …theremins…) are not commonplace and popular. Likewise, jobs in technology, which once marked one as a geek, nerd, etc, are now some of the most sought after positions. All the cool kids want to grow up to be video game designers and computer engineers. Technology is pop culture, even though few realize this fact, but the building blocks of pop culture, music, art, writing (and of course consumer products) are all starting to show signs of the influence on technology on their mediums. Nerdcore may not be the next big thing, but it’s certainly another sign of change.

Thoughts on Future Projects

With all of the little bits of art and ideas that I’ve been coming across, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on my own ideas, the project I’ve been developing and thinking about, and what other things I might incorporate into it. The project I’m working on, as I envision it, is a series of paintings that create some sort of commentary on the influence of technology on out lives. Influence may be the wrong word, perhaps invade? I want to take the everyday uses of technology to a surreal level. I want, perhaps, do question the reality we seem to take for granted.

With the newer art forms, like what Lynette Wallworth is doing with the integration of technology into art, have made me question the reason behind the use of paintings. They are an excellent way of creating through imagery an ‘reality’ that is not possible in our reality, but there are so many other ways of displaying an idea through art. There is, of course, the current limit of funding on my part. Clearly I can’t afford the elaborate technology set up to create touch sensitive, interactive art displayed on a screen, but I’m realizing that the medium is something that needs to be considered in the piece, more than which sort of paint or drawing material would best suit the image (although that is something to be considered).

Beyond that, I’ve been struggling to decide what the “reality” in my images would look like, and how to achieve the surreal aesthetic in my work. I’ve always been a fan of Salvador Dali’s work – it’s actually what got me started painting, and my first ‘good’ painting in college was a reproduction of Dali’s “necrophiliac spring flowering from a piano”

– but there are other areas of surrealism to investigate and incorporate, especially the art of HR Giger. In terms of reality, I want to integrate some aspects of the reality we see through technology – the Internet, Video Games, digital art – into the potential pieces I have in mind, and suggest some sort of confusion of reality by transposing what we see as real in our reality and what we consider real because it exists in the technology we use.

The morality of the use of our technology, especially in gaming, is something else I want to question. How do we justify the violence in video games, or even in the way we treat people in chat rooms or comment threads? How is it that we create these virtual realities for ourselves then write them off as un-real because they are based in technology? What will happen if the two are somehow confused? These are all questions I want to explore, and do so, somehow, in a visual manner.