In With The New

   


 

    Time and space today mean something completely different to what they did before. Our new technological age has trampled the truths we held as gospel regarding the connections we can make as humans from any point on earth to another. Long gone is the perilous voyage across the sea with the airplane, long gone is the delayed message by snail mail thanks to email and instant messenger services. As McLuhan puts it, "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening." (Pg. 63). 

   My project titled "In With The New" is a representation of the generational disconnect that illustrates McLuhan's insights on our new experience of time and space. The main focus is a rainy scene where a large sundial casts no shadow due to the overcast weather as preoccupied students walk past it giving it no regard and treating it like an antiquated symbol of the past. It serves no purpose to them and they look at their phones with clocks as they walk by. Besides the sundial being replaced by the mobile phone, so too has the digital camera slowly been replaced, this is why I made the decision to shoot my footage and audio on iPhone for this particular project. The audio of the fountain next to the Wriston art gallery is my attempt to bring the sensation of our overcast sundial scene to the senses. Finally, I put an eerily opaque and barely visible layer of footage that shows a time lapse of bee zygotes growing into fully grown adults which is a major life transformation that occurs in the span of a just one week to symbolize how accelerated our lives have become with the intervention of the information age. The opacity is only set to 25% so that the focus of the sundial isn't obscured and the message feels almost subliminal. I also chose to omit an end card/credits scene to give the viewer a more abrupt ending that leaves them more disoriented harkening back to my introduction post where I note that for something to be art it is important to make you feel something even if that "thing" disorientation in this case.


Comments

  1. CJ GilliamSeptember 27, 2023 at 12:36 AM

    I love the way the viewer is forced to try and figure out what is happening in the background. That element makes the video mysterious and I like it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dejah PhillipsSeptember 27, 2023 at 1:30 PM

    I like the overlay of the images combined into one film and the water fountain sounds really ties it all together!

    ReplyDelete

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