statement of intention for digiscape

S.T.Cummings
5/6/09
This piece was my first real venture into using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. It was quite the adventure, but it was fitting for the subject matter, since I was looking into my personal landscape as a citizen of the digital consumerist age.
I’m very interested in the relationships between material culture and digital culture, and consumerist/capitalist culture. For the purposes of this inquiry, by material culture I mean all of the things which exist in three dimensions and can be experienced by the five senses (it includes both man-made and naturally occurring objects and experiences) and by modern digital culture I am referring to our increasing dependency on electronic technology. Of course, the lines between the three wax, wane, and overlap but there is undoubtedly an impact on our quality of life as most of spend more time on the internet, more time shopping, and less time outside. How do computers impact the paradigms of our culture?
As occurs most often in artistic inquiries, I’ve come up with more questions than answers, and the final product is more of an expression of my ambivalence.
I began trying to create a virtual landscape reflecting what a digital environment would look like. If Facebook was a place in the way that the library is a place, what would it look like? And what would it look like while I was there? My attempt involved merging photographs and drawings with layers of zeros and ones in illustrator and Photoshop. I am not very adept though, so the results were underwhelming. Beginning drafts can be found on my blog, http://humanfemaleperson.blogspot.com.
As I was working though, something interesting began to emerge. As I reflected some photos of trees together, psychedelic monster-like creatures began to emerge where the trees met each other. I kept the image in black and white, and used a filter which made the photo less photo-like and more obviously digitally manipulated. I then experimented with matching up the photos which created the scariest images, the one I chose in the end created several faces and invoked Native American imagery. It was if nature was fighting back.