I once read this joke on Twitter which said that in the future we would all be gender fluid, racially ambiguous pansexuals. I thought it was funny and plausible and it actually sounded kind of nice. It popped into my head out of the blue one day after this project was introduced and I was instantly inspired. I thought that the joke represented the integration happening between multiple demographics, hence the mixing of races, and the fluidity of gender and sexuality. For my visual representation of expansion into space, I took the idea of integration and applied it mostly to the civilised and uncivilised parts of nature. I merged human bodies with animal bodies and foliage and created a sneak peak of what it might look like to walk around wherever we live in the future.
This is very different from the idea that I started with. Originally my concept was much and didn’t focus on any specific kind of integration. I wanted to represent an all encompassing mash up of the human race and mother nature resulting in the end of individuals and the rise of a hive minded civilisation of sorts. The end result of this concept was supposed to be a portrait. The change happened incredibly naturally. I didn’t think about the fact that my output and concept were changing at all. I didn’t even realise it until I began writing this post and reflecting on my process. The box I made is the result of me just going where my creativity took me and not second guessing too much.
In the future I’d love to redo this project with more time and less required elements. I think I might like to do a layered portrait, similar to the work of Dustin Yellin. Each layer would be a different collage representing a certain aspect of society as we now know it (i.e. gender, race, sexuality, natural environment) and the end product, when viewed head on, would be a melange of all these different things. That’d be the perfect representation of this idea.
