Response 2 – ElizaB

In response to “Modern Living / Neurotica” + “Nobody Here”:

How does each create a new and strange mirror on what it means to be human?

Modern Living/Neurotica is extremely fascinating. It consists of a collection of interactive gifs in the way that it responds to the audience’s specific selections on the screen. Each of the gifs represent grueling moments in a man’s life. In this way, the animator (Hoogerbrugge) was able to portray painful moments of human life. Though some gifs were incredibly weird to say the least, they were all in someway touching and genuinely relatable. Hoogerbrugge was able to depict real human emotions and feelings that we respond with to events that occur in life.

What kind of self is possible, or reflected, or satirized, or created via the new technologies?

I suppose in this work of art, our human self responds to technology in the most painful aspect. Technology is a way for us to expose our private lives into the world and make it public. It is also a way for us to create additional layers of personality onto our bodies. To further that concept, for example, with technology, we see the lives of others and we respond with plagiarism to an extent. We feel the need to adopt one specific part of that person that is shown on social media, the part that we are drawn to. This is how trends are started, but it is also how we begin to lose our true selves.

What is the new tech? How does it shape what kind of self is possible?

Regardless of the negative effects of technology (that I’ve mentioned in my point of view), another way to look at the same concept is the inspiration that arises from technology. While we become more and more less like our original, raw selves, we are more and more inspired everyday in different aspects. In the project “Nobody Here”, those individual, different aspects are shown on a wheel. When you scroll through the wheel, you are able to see what happens to the human as well as terms that relate to the topic at the mouse.

Do you think race, gender, class, culture, age or other factors influence these new selves?

When our new trend-based selves are created through technology, all of these factors, race, gender, class, culture, age, directly influence the shaping of our new bodies. Our identity is becoming more and more centralized around technology. This concept is depicted in both works of art where a human body  + human emotions are depicted as responses to technology. All of these individual factors are factors that contribute to our identity.

Do the very poor have access to these new selves?

When trends are started they are visible through our human bodies, not necessarily just online. I believe that the poor are able to have access to these new bodies that we’ve created for ourselves in the online community, however only to an extent.

What kind is society is created by the proliferation of these new selves?

Based on the two projects I selected to look at, our society is becoming more and more empty-bodied. We are a depressed, anxious culture yearning for clicks and scrolls. It seems like while it is exciting to learn about the fascinating technology around us and how much power it holds, our culture is becoming negatively and heavily reliant on social media and the technology that holds the power of social media. I’m not entirely sure what is to come of technology and how our culture will mold to be in the years to come.