"Tapestry of Illusions" 2023

This found footage film is a surreal approach to exploring the attraction to novelty, specifically technology. I wanted the edited visuals to communicate how our current society, culture, science, and politics are highly connected to computers and are quite dependent on the growing capabilities and contributions to our everyday life. Technology has had a profound impact on our lives and has given us an endless amount of information to access at almost any time. The novelty of technology has transformed the way we work and communicate with one another. I feel that the aesthetic of Surrealism as a modernist form displays how our interaction with technology can change our understanding of reality and the fragmented nature of our experiences and perceptions. It is a complex relationship to explore, but many modernist artists of the past demonstrate how surrealistic elements and symbols in art can disrupt reality and evoke a state of thought.

Tapestry of Illusions is a short film that is meant to be paired with the created collage of the same name. The collage was the first component of the project that I created. I wanted to mesh together technology, nature, and humans, specifically the human eyeball. This surrealist collage can be interpreted differently by individual deductions, but my goal was to artistically convey how our world has been competing with society's use of technology. While the novelty of computers has done a large amount of good for many aspects of life, there are also many downfalls in the power it holds. I knew that by collaging and layering visuals that are dreamlike and peculiar, I could use Surrealism to convey the message of our modern fragmented reality. I took a lot of inspiration from artists Man Ray and Maya Deren, and I felt that by using Emak Bakia (1926) and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), I too could invite the viewer to engage with a non-linear narrative and a fragmented and subjective view of reality just as they did. Throughout Tapestry of Illusions, there are clips that I specifically chose from each filmmaker's film and edited to interact with my own found footage in different ways. I wanted to create a recurring visual and sound design with a sequence of random components that appear to have no connection at first glance. Just like Man Ray and Deren’s work, this film aims to defy the typical expectation of logical storytelling. The inclusion of fire is meant to symbolize how technology is an ever-growing element in our human experience and it affects everything it touches. The forest/nature serves as the “tapestry” that is the symbol of human life and society. And the recurring visual of the eyeball stands in for our witnessing and understanding of a fragmented reality. Human hands are seen through the film as a way to include how much humanity has aided the progress of anything technological. These symbols act as surrealistic elements that invite the audience to question the boundaries between reality and the world of technology. The sound design is just as deliberate as the visuals themselves and I wanted to include my own kind of new music, just as we met in different works during the course. I edited audio narrations and instrumental songs from the different found footage films with my own VCV rack creation in order to give the film both symbolic sound elements and a disjunctive soundscape. The repeated visuals match with the audio, even though they sometimes come in at different times. This is meant to allow the audience to gain their own ability to make their own interpretations.

Throughout the semester, we met a variety of works that employ surrealism and technology as a means to reflect the culture, science (nature), and politics of society and human interaction. The desire for progress and innovation is deeply ingrained in our cultural mindset and actions. We want to push boundaries and disrupt the conventions we become too familiar with, which is what modernist artists have put forth in their work for many years. These artistic approaches, through imagery, technological experimentation, fragmentation, and the complexity of the human experience display the impact of technology on society. Tapestry of Illusions, both the collage and the film, use visuals and audio to disorient but also intrigue a viewer as they experience a modernist artwork that comments on novelty while embracing modernism and using the novelty of technology to present the work in the first place.