www.ritsu.com | www.staffordsmith.net
FEARSCAPE : a duet for electric violin and digital photography
Ever more disconnected from the real world, we rely on mediated simulations to shape our thoughts and knowledge, our understanding of our world. Rather than venturing out and learn from direct experience, many opt for pre-selected and digested information - information that is designed to control us, control our money, our decisions and control our beliefs.
The home has become less and less the place we feel protected and safe from the world and more a place of anxiety, our fearscape. It is no longer a place of domestic tranquility. Instead, it is a space infiltrated by the television, the computer , the newspaper, the ever-increasing threat level, the fear mongering talk show host; anyone or anything that steps in between us and everything else and keeps us in constant anxiety. Fear is a powerful motivator. It drives elections, it drives consumer demand and opens our wallets. We buy everything from duck-tape to tamiflu; everything from bombshelters to airbags. We are afraid. We no longer see birds in flight. We see vectors of illness. We no longer see peaceful neighborhoods. We see potential predators at every turn. Fear is everywhere.
Our project, FEARSCAPE, is created in response to these thoughts with a live performance of music and photography in a fruitless attempt at understanding.
The photographer brings his macro lens to the screen as it plays footage of assassinations, war, illness and hatred. Yet, the harder he looks, the closer he focuses, the less he finds. Photography has a lot to do with the insatiable quest for knowledge. We need to know things. We feel that the quest for knowledge or data is a worthwhile occupation. We photograph and photograph generating piles and piles of data. But in the end we find that the accumulated data tells us next to nothing. It is a distraction. Rather than give too little information it is better to give too much. How can one separate the truth out from the noise?
It is folly. It is farce. Yet careers are built on it. Economies are driven by it. Governments thrive on it. It is the fearscape.
see the artist talk given at Kendall College of Art and Design, Oct 9, 2009