Originally, the concept I wanted to explore for our “imaginary culture” revolved around technology addiction. Admittedly, this was just a thinly veiled excuse for me to continue my elitist, condescending, holier-than-though crusade against people I think spend too much time glued to their phones. I’ve ranted enough about this in the past that, for now, I’ll be succinct: I worry that too much time spent absorbed in devices leads to serious social/developmental failures. Technology is not inherently bad. There is a healthy, responsible amount of time to spend on a device and it just so happens to be the exact amount of time that I personally engage in. I’m a jerk.
This virus/social isolation ordeal we’ve collectively been going through has recalibrated my stance on technology. When the internet felt like a luxury, it was easy to criticize those I thought guilty of frivolous over-indulgence. Today, it feels like a necessity. I myself have gone from maybe an hour a day of online activity in my personal time to spending, conservatively, 36 hours a day in front of a screen. It’s how I do my job, attend classes, do my shopping, keep informed, check in with family…it’s become the platform through which I entirely function. If a person wants more stimulus from life than what can be had bouncing a tennis ball off of four walls, getting online is practically mandatory. Who am I to begrudge someone for wanting to connect to a thriving virtual world rather than endure the anxiety inducing nightmare that is the real one? I think I can cool it on the smug criticism for awhile.
The contemporary artists I chose for this assignment were selected before the outbreak. As a result, they feel like a time capsule now. A relic of a time when the greatest existential threat I was facing was Tik-Tok or Instagram. I’m going to speak of what originally drew me to them, with the caveat that what once felt like scathing social commentary to me, now reads more like needless party pooping.
Pawel Kuczynski
https://www.pictorem.com/profile/Pawel.Kuczynski
Pawel Kuczynski is an illustrator from Poznan, Poland. As I don’t speak Polish, I have little insight into his thought process other than what his work tells me. That’s fine, as his clear, satirical images are able to communicate plenty. Kuczynski targets a lot of the same sources of skepticism that I share, and does so through a sharp, observational sense of humor. Something about the way he frames a scene, renders the human figure, and delivers a visual “punch line” in his paintings makes me think of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” comics.
“Confessional” is as mystified as I am with the way people seem perfectly content to air their dirty laundry through social media channels such as Facebook, effectively shouting their personal problems and failures to their friends, family, employers, and strangers.
A similar idea is reflected in “Watcher” in which the Facebook “f” logo is portrayed as a surveillance camera. Everything we do on Facebook is public, who knows who is watching, or what they are doing with that information?
In “Gossip” salacious hearsay passed along in hushed tones is converted into a tweet and sent out to the world at large through Twitter. In a connected society, any information you choose to share with others is susceptible to unrestricted dissemination.
These three pieces are a small sampling of the way Kuczynski comments on our willingness to sacrifice our privacy in exchange for social media access. My topic was on technology addiction, and this is the behavior of addicts: Self-destructive decisions blindly made in pursuit of an object of desire.
John Holcroft
John Holcroft is a commercial and freelance illustrator from the UK. His work is digital, presumably vector based, which adds a layer of irony as his subject matter is frequently critical of an over-dependence on technology. While not as overtly humorous as the work of Pawel Kuczynski, his pieces are clever, and colorful, imbuing them with a sense of playfulness.
The messages he sends can be metaphorical, as in the scene of a man filling his ego with a bowl full of Facebook “likes” or literal, in which a baby chooses a smartphone over a rattle. The relationship between children and technology, in particular, seems to be a concern of Holcroft. In one piece, a small boy is gripped by tentacles physically emanating from his tablet. In another, a young girl has grown foliage from sitting motionless in front of her phone for so long. My personal favorite features a teenager on his phone, encased in a wall made of Lego bricks. His parents are building the wall, or possibly trying to break it down, but in either scenario the sense of separation and isolation conveyed by a person constantly engrossed in their device is clearly communicated.
When viewing his work as a whole, John Holcroft revisits themes of social media being addictive, in some cases a literal trap, and potentially harmful to our youth. As a commercial illustrator, it could be argued that these are evidence of the client’s feelings more than Holcroft’s. I am of the mind that even freelance artists are drawn to the projects that are of personal interest to them, and the repetitive themes of this artist’s work can be trusted to reflect his own beliefs.
