Here’s my 2014 in review…….
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Like the Emperors and leaders of past times, we like to project a carefully constructed identity to our public rather than our real self. Only now, we can all do it, we don’t need to commission an artist to do the job for us. We use the tools available to us and we carefully sculpt out the self portrait we want to project.
I’m interested in how we present ourselves online, our status updates paint a portrait of ourselves in a way that we can’t do in real life. One statement can shape how we are perceived as it blows one small aspect of our being out of all proportion. On your profile page, the only thing they see is your status and not the other details that contribute to who we are.
This is a piece of artwork I have created in response to a Talenthouse call out for artists. If you like it you can vote for me on both Facebook and Twitter.
Barbie is an iconic flawless doll that oozes perfection, however, she also represents a materialistic lifestyle which raises the question ‘if she was real, would she be happy?’ I was inspired by the singers’ unique vintage style, music and delicate features and I wanted my finished piece to contain elements of these along with some of the charming eccentricities attributed to the fabulous Paloma Faith.
https://www.talenthouse.com/i/458/submission/134584/47eb496c
A crossover between real life and social media interactions, reality becomes distorted, who sees what? Others, maybe even strangers begin to have an input in our lives! Do we control it or have we lost control?
Life is so unfair…. with age comes wisdom, sometimes!
We have developed a dependency on those devices that provide us with all we need to know about the world and they are all we need to let the world know about us. How about if there was nothing more than what was contained within the edges of the box we hold in our hand, no further searching, no further discovering….
We have become dependent on our devices as a source for everything, I wonder how long it would take if we stopped receiving our news in this way? Would we panic? Would we soon get used to it again?
I have been exploring how the digital documentation of our lives online using social media is infiltrating our physical being. Public spaces are no longer limited to when we step outside the front door. Spaces we share extends beyond physical public spaces, parks, shops, nightclubs and bars.
Over the last few years we have begun to play out our lives online, documenting what we do, where we go, what we eat and how we look. We seek the world’s approval while we do all these thing and in addition, the world seeks our approval.
But maybe now there is no divide between our online presence and our physical lives, perhaps it has become one reality.
Samantha Humphreys 