In my opinion, my piece is a Mirror. I think that we as consumers of digital media often pick and choose what we pay attention to. The problem is that our choices are based off of what is entertaining to us, and not necisarily what is important. In my drawing, the teenage subject is paying attention to his iPhone, and completely ignoring the burning building, the story about the massacre at Ft. Hood, and the bullet headed straight towards his head.
While making this piece, I was thinking about how certain concepts such as capitalism, consumerism, and digitalization all come together. I realized that when we assume something like our iPhone or an iPod can teach us something (like the arguments in Everything Bad is Good For You), we don't account for the fact that we get so rapped up in the entertainment of the device, that we really don't learn anything. We do however, become addicted to them. We constantly want the next big thing, and thus play right into the hands of the capitalists. Continuously consuming makes us less aware of the important content, and more impressed by "shiny things", or explosions, or fun shit. We are targets of the hit men who are conglomerates. The song bullet in your head (Rage Against The Machine) is about the consumer "bullet" that companies plant in your brain, giving us our value as assets to corporations by buying and buying.
The process that I went through to create this, was constantly adding and creating to make a visual web of connecting ideas. In the bottom right corner of the drawing, I have a quote, from the Islamic caliph; Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib. Ali was a supposed descendant and companion of the prophet Muhammad. The quote I use is "Knowledge raises the low, but ignorance brings down the mighty". I thought that for this unit, this is an adequate summary of the ideas we have covered. I wanted to depict Ali's words in my project, and as a result, I ended up with this.
The drawing features a headline at the bottom of the T.V. about the Ft. Hood Shootings, because I felt that in order to justify my message, I needed to not be hypocritical, and thus I addressed an extremely important and current event. The reason that I use the Caliph Ali's quote as my foundation for this project, is that I believe we all are capable of being intellectual individuals, but it requires effort. Often, we fail to become intelligent because we lack determination, and use our digital devices, like iPhones, to distract us from the complex world around us. I do not believe that Ali is correct in using the word "low", because it is not that we learn, but how we learn, and from where we learn it, which is important. Ignorance, is a powerful thing, a thing that unquestionably has the power to cause people to make fatal errors, and repeat the errors of those who preceded them.
On a concluding note, I want to add, that I give a little acnowledgement to M.T. Anderson in my artistic piece. In depicting a headphone jack leading from the teenage subject to a man on the T.V. staring at the teen, and listening to headphones leading from the kid, I am portraying the stranglehold on our minds and bodies which corporations often have over those of us who choose to remain ignorant.
"Knowledge raises the low, but ignorance brings down the mighty" - Caliph Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib
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