Assignment 4

Here's my Assignment 4. Yay for radial gradients!

In Assignment 4, we explored technology’s relationship to the landscape. I realized as I was brainstorming for this project that almost everything around me is technology. Buildings, cars, power lines, even the genetically modified corn stubble in the field across the road, are all technologies that dominate the view from my window. In many ways in my day-to-day life, technology is the landscape. I am so reliant on technology that very few aspects of my life would even be possible without it. I kind of live in a bubble of technology, like a tomato in a hoop tunnel.

            For this project I took pictures of three computer labs that I frequent around campus  -admittedly technology dense areas- and cut everything but objects giving off light from the images. I had to be selective in what I chose to keep in the pictures, because, as they were taken indoors, virtually everything they contained was technology. I chose light-emitting things like computer screens to keep in the images because I thought they would make a good representation of technology as a whole. Overhead lights, computer monitors, small LED power lights, and the screen of my cell phone are the only things I left in the images.

My intention for this assignment was to demonstrate just how much of our surroundings can be composed of technology and thereby show that technology can be the landscape. By removing everything but the computer monitors and lights in the photographs, my intention was to leave a landscape that was still recognizable.  I hope that the result of this selective cutting allows the viewer to recognize the content of the original pictures, and demonstrates how much of a landscape can be made up of technology. Once I had cut out the features of these three pictures, I realized that they provided another kind of perspective as well. It is interesting to see the orderly structure of the monitors and lights lined up in rows from the walls to the ceiling, and the depth of the space in the images that they reveal through the perspectives of their standard rectangular shape.

I think that part of someone else’s work on this assignment is visible on one of the monitors in the second panel. Is that one Chelsea’s computer? Actually, in the second panel, which was made with a picture of the art lab, you can see our whole class in progress. I think it’s really cool that a room full of people working on this project became the subject in my own work for this assignment. I don't think that was on my mind when I took the picture but I really like it.