2007
3.3 billion
3%
80%
graduation project
My graduation project focuses on the following streams of events.
I wish to raise questions about the dominant roll of urban environment in our life, as it is an altering factor to our natural awareness and I reflect on the influence of the ongoing technological- information evolution, within these urban settings, in relation to the consumer society.
As an artist it is my aim to call attention to the underlying patterns of these complex issues to stimulate the viewer's perception.
Since 2007, for the first time in the history of human civilization over half of the world’s population lives in cities, which are responsible for 75% of all the energy consumption and 80% of all the pollution. 3.3 billion people occupy 3% of the Earth’s surface. Modern cities are slowly turning fiction into reality as our urban environment starts to resemble more and more the scenery of movies such as Blade runner and Johnny Mnemonic. Futuristic ideas dated in the past are our present in the now.
As the human proportion is diminishing in these 21st century metropolises man trades in nature and the native natural states for streets crowded with alienated individuals moving about in a maze of concrete blocks rising in some cases hundreds of meters above ground level. Locked in our new digital world of social networking society, observed and tracked by network providers and satellites we live in our synthetic freedom.
The major metropolises are overpopulated urban environments. They are the Atemporal battlefields of a decaying consumer society, which fights an already lost battle for survival in a state of crisis capitalism, like a terminal patient fights cancer.
The sight to the open sky, which once guided sailors and connected man to natural phenomenona is disapearing and our awareness is changing with it.
One might interpret the broken up sky as a metaphor for the loss of our first nature, which builds upon compassion, joy, wisdom, while some others might see it as a shimmering light of hope to find our way back.
In my photo series I chose for a visual language, which is echoing Malevich’s “Black square” and Rothko’s “Seagram Murals”, to mark the present turning point in our visual culture and to reach out for the basic human emotions.
I reposition myself as a photographer in the image capturing process by working with Google’s streetview. I place the mechanically made images in a new context after applying an inversed perception to them, which emphasize meanings that were even though embedded as potentiality within the original imagery, were also in some ways suppressed by the informative nature of the intention with which these images were taken.