website layout and design
Here are some of the first designs for my website. I liked the play on words in the graphic name. However being dyslexic myself I wanted my site to be assessable to people with disabilities so we changed the design.
NEW DESIGN
As you can see I made the text layout very clear and we used very large font to increase accessibility for Neurodiverse people and sight impaired. the navigation odf the site is very simple and intuitive.
Here is a deep dive into one of the projects I have included in the site at the end of this post I have also included copy of my CV which was used as a reference for my ABOUT section
PROJECT 1 – CORONA VISION – LOCKDOWN ART
FROM THE 12th of March 2020 I TOOK 9788 photographs of my television over a period of 68 days. thats an average 148 images a day.
While locked in my house the television became my new portal to the outside world. It became a place i could visit while locked in, my new virtual Hyper reality. Over the next weeks i just watched and watched and obsessively took photographs.I was stuck, at times paralysed with anxiety and fear addictively watching the world transform before my eyes
using the graphic elements from my Images I was able to created an interesting narrative tool that allowed me in a way to create short films in a single image. to tell a story, The Story, or rather the story the media and government brian washed me into believe… for weeks and weeks there was nothing but death and fear spewing from the television set.
Images of virus where everywhere and in a way i became hypnotised by the circular shape and internal beauty of the virus
i also started to watch he daily death toll.. it almost became like gambling on the stock exchange, dopamein bursts and increased heart rates when the number of dead went up and up like a stock market while the financial markets crashed all around the world.
After a time i began to see the fear that was controlling me and started to with draw from the dreaded news narrative, like many in lock down i made sourdough bread, jam ,grew vegetable, my cat died, i cried, i missed my family, but i started to get some acceptance and regained some freedom and began to recognise my anger and ultimately its self destructive.
I made grids of every thing. i have 100s of grids. i also made grids in loads of different software packages. on my iPhone as screen shots, on amazon photo, in adobe bridge, i did grids with boarders and grids with out. i even started making grids of grids of grids Corona Vision was only created because i had fallen in to a Hyperreality rabbit hole during the first weeks of lock down and the global pandemic of Covid-19. Baudrillard has been credited with inventing to term Hyperreality and used terms like “Blizzards of information” and has described “the ecstasy of communication”.
Over a 9 week period i had taken 9788 pictures of my Sony Television with my IPhone and now realise I had lost my grip on reality. I was compelled and addicted to my television, gripped by the propaganda and fear that spewed out of every news channel. I had no reference and in a sea of subliminal fake news was gripped by a terror of confusion and lack of control. Addicted to adrenaline and other neurochemicals being constantly triggered by the drug we call television. I am shocked at how extreme my reaction was and how now in 2020, I am, l believe living in a world so profoundly described by Baudrillard. When the present government is actually a giant PR company where no one knows how to anything but lie, the death tolls rise, the graphics all brightly coloured become meaningless, a game a non reality. impossible to navigate. Baudrillard posed many questions. Is it possible to lose contact with reality and float away from the material world to something else
Art is always an illusion, is writing a kind of virtual reality and do the pixels of our televisions masquerade as reality? Don’t all these things already merge in advertising…..when they are based on nothing
The wikapedia definition of Hyperreality is
Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.[1] Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.[2] It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence(AI).[2]
Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.
The words of Baudrillard and the art of Nam June Paik with his show “good morning MR Orwell” ( worlds first cross continent live satellite linked show broadcast in 1984) tie perfectly in with my work Corona Vision. Where many images from a single TV sourced from an infinite number of channels at a time of crisis created a hyperreality that that left me controlled by a project of fear like we have never seen. When Paik broadcast “Good morning Mr Orwell” in 1984 he is quoted as believing there was a good side to George Orwell’s Big Brother, i am not sure that is true today. the Big Brother of our PR based societies of valueless signs and communications seems very sinister indeed.
With CORONA VISION I am basically doing the same thing but with a still image. I am taking other peoples output and combining it to make something new. instead of layering images I am grouping them into mini narratives and dances of colour. together they are new.
ART – Its paint on a canvas, arrangments of paint or pixels or chemicals… all art is an illusion. You can’t fix light and the world, its always changing.
Below is a list of artists i have researched around my Corona vision project and are going to be a continued source of inspiration while i continue my project.
About
ELIZA FUTURE 