Concept

The original driving motivation for this project arose from a similar project concept of mine with the desire to encourage people’s engagement with the world in any capacity possible, in order to emphasize the value of each action we take towards the issues that matter to us. This pushed me to think deeper about how people view themselves as individuals in the world and what impact they envision themselves as capable of creating, which led me toward simplifications of the aspects of our everyday lives as a means to prove the major impact of even the small behaviors we do when they accumulate and unite.

As such, my project became a matter of presenting how small changes in multiple factors form the being of an individual, their actions, and the results of those actions in the world and upon others. Showing our interconnectedness consequently requires us to recognize that our behaviors and responses have an impact, beyond a binary of good or bad and outside a specific scale.

It starts from the very senses and nervous system reactions of our bodies. We feel or smell or see or hear or taste something. We register that aspect of our external world. We also feel pain – interior or exterior – that can signal something as simple as needing to eat, pee, or sleep; or something more, signaling a deeper pain that needs a greater external response, or perhaps if not caught in time, our bodies shut down in response instead until we can stabilize internally or be stabilized externally to regain our senses and responses. When external reactions are presented to us, it reflects also on another being’s senses now registering us and responding to us and our behaviors. Now, our reactions become interactions, and such interactions exist within our bodies, toward others, and toward the world. This is the core of my project: that interactions happen at all scales. Every interaction is a cause and effect; a signal and response; an action and impact.

In this way, the small scale of my project – one between metaphorical organisms of a digitized human and an artificial water environment, and further the surrounding gallery space of electronics and living beings – intends to form a microcosm of our reactions and interactions in the larger world. This is all done in the hope that we recognize what one small step among many small steps can do and contribute to, and what we currently need to identify within ourselves as a need or response we can or must make for ourselves, others, or the world.

Notably though, it is just as important to the project to recognize unknown cues or ignored cues as well, just as it is important to discover the external unknown or ignored calls in the world from others. It is an intentional act to overcome what you ignore, and it is one that is difficult to persistently engage, so my project displays an approximate repetition of responses to push the viewer into persistent consideration with unheard cues and calls.