Monday, February 22, 2010

Catching up

I realized that maybe I have been slacking in blog posts lately so I will to do two posts to catch up. First in this one I have finished pictures of my collages that I showed you all the third week when Arturo asked for them, I realized though I never got the finished pics on the blog so here
they are:


This first collage I showed you all was inspired from the visual explanations text. Its just a simple juxtaposistion of a serendipitous relationship in shape and form. I had these bronze bird skulls that I had made recently that i knew I wanted to use. I flipped open an old childrens book and found an image of an icecream cone that was exactly the same shape and outline of the skull. I liked the relationship of the two, of differently similar, so i decided to constrain them here in this collage.




This second collage has been become a visual factotum for the overall thesis of my work here at digital worlds, and that, in the broadest sense, is the question of can we use technology to augment empathy? The tableaux mimics the chakra system while paralleling Maslow's
Hierarchy of needs, linearly up the center, while forwarning of ego or desire driven augmentation around the sides of the image.
It is my fear that as we begin to augment our mental and physcial bodies through technological enhancements that we will forget to augment our very souls. The powerful consumers of the world will be able to even more effortless exploit the worlds poor through their enhanced state of beings.
I worry that as we merge with machines that our empathy and human spirit will wither if we do not actively seek ways to incorporate the incorporeal into technological systems.
That is my purpose of these projects I am working on, to actively seek solutions to this problem.

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