Inspiration:
This week, my primary focus was on visuals for my project. For this I was, what you could call, anti-inspired. In the context of human extraction. I have been heavily thinking about Photoshop’s and in a larger scale, Adobe’s contribution to unchecked editing towards a perfection that their algorithms determine. This became apparent when I had been doing research for a class I am currently teaching where I was trying to find examples of contemporary photo composite artists. I came across this article on artsy: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-women-photographers-redefining-surrealism-21st-century In this article they claim that the female form has “became the ultimate surrealist object, it was mystified, fetishized, and othered.” Then I found this only reinforced by the fact that the vast majority of the top search results for surrealist, collage, and composite photographers are white European/American artists that use the female form as a primary subject. Some Examples: https://iso.500px.com/12-surrealist-photographers-to-follow-on-500px/
During this search I was also reminded by Unity making contracts with the US military: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d4jy/unity-workers-question-company-ethics-as-it-expands-from-video-games-to-war
All these links point to the idea that the effect that the tools that we use must be looked at critically.
Progress:
For progress this week and in response to my research, I decided to use Photoshop to generate my visuals. I took a simple selfie then used the healing tool over a hundred times to create different variations. The importance of using this tool was to understand how Photoshop sees human perfection. Then I wanted to distort and rebel from it.
Afterword’s, I put everything into After Effects and blended it together into a cohesive piece.
Reflection:
It has been interesting to incorporate some critical content into my work finally and it has been an interest process doing it in such a specific way. Regarding feedback I got from my peers, it has produced some interesting reactions, and should probably fit into a larger body of work.
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