Finding a surprising synergy in similar projects from other students, this series goes in a different direction by examining the unimportant, underappreciated objects that I use in my everyday. From a palm cross that has sat forgotten on bookshelves and cases in the last 4 years to 25 year old unbranded cutlery that shows the marks of its age.
While literally living in my parents basement, my father’s joke that the only light I get is from screens increasingly rings true. Inspired by this joke/complaint, I wanted to document my interaction with devices in a unique way.
LED screens have a uniform white backlight, with a color filter atop to create an image. In this series, I used the LED backlight of my 3 most used devices (Computer monitor, phone, and TV) as the sole source of illumination to capture my likeness while using the device.
To say that we have collectively developed news exhaustion is something of an understatement. It’s a fire hose of information that is both constantly changing and endlessly repetitive. Inspired vaguely by the style of ‘La Jetée’, I wanted to capture how news consumption is making me feel at this moment. Below is a montage of exactly one hours news consumption, between 12:48 and 1:48 on 04/12.
Chaos theory is the branch of mathematics that studies the states of a dynamic system whose apparently random nature is governed by deterministic laws that are incredibly sensitive to the system’s initial conditions.† This class of systems are heavily affected by what’s commonly known as ‘the butterfly effect’, where incredibly small changes in the initial system state result in large changes in the output. This effect is commonly demonstrated using a double pendulum, where slight differences in its initial position result in unique and varied dynamic behaviors. ‡
Over the last two weeks I instructed my mother, father, and sister “please take an image of Ike”. I also asked them for two random numbers, the first between zero and four thousand, the second between zero and six thousand. Using their image and pixel selection, I cropped into the forty thousand pixels surrounding the one they selected.
With a near-identical input, out came completely separate final images. These differences not only reflect the stylistic preferences of my family members, but also how they interpreted the instructions, my underlying expectations, and their ability to actualize my request.
† I’d like to thank a two-week quarantine induced YouTube binge for that piece of information
‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Double_pendulum_simultaneous_realisations.ogv
