The Cost of Attention
At the end of my senior year of college, I created a series of works that acted as a critique of widespread issues in the modern social media age. In my research for the project, I identified five topics that I wanted to turn into artistic representations; I titled them Endless Scrolling, Flattened Friendship, Positivity Bias, Connection Overload, and Instant Gratification.
Flattened Friendship is an abstract representation of the ubiquitous ‘friend’ on social media. Because online ‘friends’ can range from family to stranger, I wanted to illustrate this person who watches us persistently and emotionlessly.
These portraits were created in Photoshop by blending together the faces of people I know in real life until they are almost unrecognizable, but maintaining an eerie sense of familiarity.
Connection Overload is my attempt at illustrating being trapped in a shallow state of consciousness as we interact with meaningless content. As we grasp from one topic to another, it feels mind-numbing and unproductive. Combining aggregated content from my social media feed, I built an image that was visually stimulating, yet devoid of meaning.