I think the internet functions as a double-edged sword for the art world. On one end, it has potential to spread the message, feelings, and/or emotions of the art among thousands and perhaps millions more people. Although on the other end, it can dull down the quality, value, and significance of the art.
For instance, if an album is ripped to the computer and put onto a website where anyone can download the music, it can literally lower the sound quality. Also, one can download an album off the internet and it could be missing tracks, the songs are not titled, or they may not even know the album it is from, and this is not how the music was intended to be shared with the word. Yet if one looks past those aspects, the music is still shared and enjoyed among a much larger range of listeners in which it can inspire, motivate, relate to, and possibly even change them.
The same goes with photography. On the internet, the viewer can see the photograph in many different sizes, tints, qualities, and other aspects of the photo that it was not supposed to be viewed in, which can take away some of the feelings, thoughts, and/or emotions meant to be portrayed in the photograph. It can be shown in so many places so many times it can dull down the effectiveness and power it has from viewing it in its "pure" form.
This is the first of probably many observations about how the internet effects our society.
This is my first attempt at photocollaging. In this collage, I was hoping to show how the corporate media portrays the bad things that happen within our country. They will tone down the seriousness of events in which human rights are being violated, Americans are not being viewed as heroes, or of events that the media is unsure of how the people will react to them. The juxtaposition of flowers with U.S. Marines in action, an endless blockade of riot cops, and repeated images of one of the torture victims at the Abu Ghraib prison attempt to make the images more tame due to a flower's symbolic connotation. The torture victims almost blend into the floral background as if they are unimportant and should forget about them, but the solders and cops are still as clear as day, and despite what surrounds them, you still have to ask yourself: why do they always look so intimidating?
This is the same collage after I went back and messed around with it a little bit. I didn't even touch color alteration or addition of any type in the first collage, so I wanted to work with it a bit. This is much unlike any of my other work, in the sense that it has an almost popart (pop ART not poptart) essence to it. This collage even further inforces my point of how the corporate media wishes to portray incidents as mentioned above. Juxtaposition and repetition are important aspects in this collage, and i tried to push them as much as possible.
