Link to video:
Wall Didactic:
Isolation–The Warped World of Television
Isabel Anguera
This short experimental video means to show the evolution and mutual isolation of the way that people watch television. Over time, the act of watching television in itself has become more of a confined and personal activity. Because of quickly evolving technology, the way we do common day things, such as watch a show that we like, changes every few years, or at this point even months. Technology has advanced immensely and this video explores potential ties between these technological advancements and how we as a culture have changed with them. Just the word television has evolved from a machine to an intangible thing. In my accompanying research paper I explored the history of television, the potential future, and how it ties into our society. It is already known that the programs on air tie into and reflect on our current culture, but what about the technology itself. Are we less patient today because of how fast the technological world is becoming? Are we more isolated? Nowadays people put their headphones on and watch whatever they want on their own personal screen–what they’re watching could be unknown to even the people sitting shoulder to shoulder with them–when earlier people would go to the theater or watch TV in a communal space, where anyone could join. People were welcome to sit down and watch an episode of some show with you, and now it seems like watching television implies shutting yourself off from the world.
Originally this piece was shorter, had less images, and didn’t warp as it looped. After critique last week, I wanted to make the video more critical–the warped images imply a disturbing/mesmerizing aspect that is the way that we now watch tv. While before the video was more of a recounting of this evolution, now it speaks to how it’s warping our societal values.
In general I have found these Bridge Projects to be interesting–I think that focusing on one object was hard but beneficial in terms of pushing myself to fully explore a topic rather than looking into it for a little while and then moving on to something different. It helped, especially towards the end, to use the research papers from seminar, as the information that I found was something that was personally interesting to me and could take me in a specific direction in my studio projects. In my opinion, the final bridge project and the three enhanced iterations of our objects, (I think Bridge 3), were the most interesting–both of these actually involved some sort of collaboration and feedback from the class at some point before turning in a final product. I think that I learned a lot over the semester, but the most important thing was that I need to push myself in more of a critical direction when it comes to my work–I tend to avoid expressing my opinions when they might be polarizing, which often makes my work less powerful.
