Final Project

What Defines Us?

Admittedly, when I started with this project, I had an extremely hard time defining a direction to go in. I knew I wanted to make something visually appealing but that was about the biggest lead I had. My first thoughts centered around the idea of “upsetting the norm,” doing something out of the ordinary that people would be a little confused by. I wanted to go in the direction of one of my favorite artists and defy convention. The more I thought about my ideas, the less I came up with. It took some talking through to come to a conclusion… I couldn’t make this idea work because it seemingly wasn’t “me.” I was trying to mimic some one else’s work instead of make something that defined who I actually was.

Once I came to this realization, I started to think about what exactly defined whom I was. I started looking at the forms of media that I use in everyday of my life – computer, iphone, Facebook ect. I decided to explore one of these areas and make a piece about it. Ultimately, I settled on Facebook. Then I started to think about this in a different way. Facebook is not only something that can define me, it’s something that can define almost everybody in our generation. We put our lives on this thing and spend hours looking at the lives of others. I wanted to ask everybody how exactly he or she was defined in Facebook, an online profile that publicizes them to the world and that will be with them forever.

In my final work, I wanted to create images that portrayed certain ideas about Facebook: 1) the time we put into them, 2) the public aspect of it and 3) how they will always be there. The picture in the top left describes the first point. We probably spend more time than we should in Facebook and often are distracted from things like class. This shows me sitting in class (the one I usually don’t pay attention in), but instead of taking notes on the material, I was “taking notes” on Facebook. The second point is described by the bottom picture. At a movie theater, the movie posters are replaced by Facebook pages. This symbolizes how Facebook is like a presentation of our lives to whoever may want to watch. Lastly, the third point is described by the top right image. It is supposed to be an arm with a tattoo of “Facebook” on it. Like a tattoo that will, more or less, be there forever, data put on the internet is extremely difficult to get rid of completely. Our Facebook pages will be with us basically forever. This thought may make you reevaluate what all you put on there.

As for my final image, I guess you can say I’m pleased with it. Of course as I look at it I see some things I would change. The contour of the Facebook page overlay on the notebook could better follow the lines of the page (I used GIMP on this project and couldn’t, for the life of me, find the equivalent tool from PS), the movie posters do not have the glare on them that should be there, and the tattoo could wrap around the arm a little better (again, couldn’t find the wrap tool in GIMP). Also, I should have moved the bottom picture to the right a little. Overall, I think it gets my point across and I do like it. It follows my style of clean, straight lines and minimal clutter with a fair amount of negative space. I probably should have budgeted my time with it a little more, but sometimes life is busy. 

And for the last song of the year.... Heres an artist that went virtually unknown until one of his songs become the official song of the World Cup. This is not that song but it is one of my favorites by him. Heres Knaan with "Take A Minute."