Colonized, commodified, and reshaped by market forces, the palimpsestic female body is a site where cultural phenomenology and social perversions have historically been inscribed. The state of the spectacle empties and nullifies every real identity. In its place, the media offers ideologically infused avenues for identity construction. From the array of media text, gender roles are realized, social norms are cemented and beauty standards are established. Becoming the new feminine ideal requires the right combination of insecurity, exercise, bulimia and surgery. Low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, and botox junkies are symptoms of a society that propagates beauty as the standard against which all women are measured, hinging a woman’s worth on her waistline. Self-hood has become a shifting experience-inauthentic and skin deep.
History reveals itself in the details. Inscriptions and visual articulations of the past, temporally estranged, yet spatially layered, are transcribed simultaneously on the walls of cities conceding as a form of ethnography. This compulsive archiving reflects both the undifferentiated society of the globalized world, while also exposing the cultural historicity connected to the details defining a place. The systemic and global documentation of city walls provides a field study of empirical data revealing the ethnogenesis, politics, religions and cultural truths of a locality and their connection to the landscape.
The non-linear equations of evolution, totality of reality and the complex interrelationship of its parts are unseen by the naked eye. Under magnification, patterns of order and new structures emerge, a symmetry is found in the chaos.
The world, no longer in focus, has succumbed to a blur of movement amidst the obscurity of media images and sequence of endless distractions and schizophrenic moments. In the space of post-history where all grand narratives dissipate, technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. Our collective consciousness has been reduced to a scattered daze that drifts from the new multiplex to old strip mall, from one meal to the next, twitter to text message, coffee to
The world, no longer in focus, has succumb to a blur of movement amidst the obscurity of media images and sequence of endless distractions and schizophrenic moments. In the space of post-history where all grand narratives dissipate, technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. Our collective consciousness has been reduced to a scattered daze that drifts from the new multiplex to old strip mall, from one meal to the next, twitter to text message, coffee to cigarette, rush hour traffic and the fast food drive thru. The struggle is apathy, complacency, it never being enough, China, Iraq, the C.I.A. Somewhere in the numbing hours in front of the TV our life slips away between commercials, our attention still hijacked by the next new thing flickering on screen.
The non-linear equations of evolution, totality of reality and the complex interrelationship of its parts are unseen by the naked eye. Under magnification, patterns of order and new structures emerge, a symmetry is found in the chaos.
