Humanity is becoming increasingly reliant on technology for every aspect of our life. With social
media, even the way we define and present our identity has become digitized. We have to fit most of our
entire ideal identity into a single image and text box. We consume so much of this daily, that learning
someone’s interests don’t even require conversation. We put so much time into our profiles yet they are
needles in a haystack, blink and you’ll miss it.
We are often blind to the fact we are projecting this all onto gears wires and led’s. We are
creating a human soul and identity with identical hardware, yet we are blind to that fact. I wanted to
reverse that, in this piece, the participant can’t see their true selves, only the blur of profiles. The real
art is hidden from view, the hardware we use to convey our soul, our identity, struggling to try and fit such
a complex human form. It’s something most of us never think to see.
The idea of a person made of inanimate objects is fairly common across art and media. My
original inspiration was Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits. I also was inspired by the way old Automatons
were usually built in forms that resembled humans, even though there were likely more efficient forms,
and often tried to hide their mechanics from the viewer.