HW 21: Art Project

(The Speech balloons, or boxes in this case, came out blurry so I've re-written them below)

Panel 1: nothing

Panel 2: "Select Tool"

Panel 3: "Copy"

Panel 4: "Print"

Panel 5: nothing

Panel 6: "Realistic Accuracy Achieved 75%"

I decided to make a one page comic about a robot that wanted to represent reality, in this case a nice sunset in a meadow. It does this by using commands and tools that computer users will be familiar with, it copy's the scenery and prints it to see that it can't accurately copy the scene in front of him. This is true of digital media as well as all media, reality can't be fully captured in any medium, in this case the picture didn't look fully like the real image but in today's technology we can't simulate full reality. While we have sight and sound copied we can't copy smells at the same time or copy what the person might physically feel at that time.

The robot feels somewhat frustrated that it can't copy reality completely, this shows our obsession with copying reality, we've become so obsessed that we believe we can copy anything. People have become so arrogant in their ability to copy reality that you can only assume someone might get frustrated when they can't copy it correctly, much like an artist who gets frustrated that they can't draw something the way they see it or imagine it. This piece of art is like a mirror, but it doesn't reflect the viewer directly, it reflects the media that the viewer creates or takes part in. This piece of art doesn't inspire change because I don't feel like it's necessary, people will naturally copy the images they see but it's important to see that the object we copy is still there and can be enjoyed for what it is.

One interesting obstacle that came about when I was making this comic was making the robot likable. I didn't want to make some sort of evil robot who would "rape" reality by copying it and trying to commercialize it or something. The robot's intention was to save the image of the beautiful sunset not to make it obsolete by copying it, the makers of the Wii didn't want to make outside physical activity obsolete, and the makers of Facebook didn't want to make social interaction obsolete either, they wanted to copy a portion of reality for a constructive purpose. In the Wii's case to influence gamers to exercise more and in the case of Facebook to have people be able to share photos easier and talk to friends who might be far away. The way I did this was I made the robot happy and borrowed elements from the face of EVE from "Wall-E" who looks approachable and friendly (when her face is green and she isn't blowing things up). This project was fun to do and it's refreshing to be able to express ideas outside of blog posts for a change.