Pressure Project 2 – Human Nature

I spent most of my project time trying to decide which level of perception would be the most beneficial for telling a story of strong cultural significance. I thought about using a fictional story but I wanted to make an impact on the experiencer without suspending their disbelief, which is why I chose to tell the story of human beings destroying the planet’s environments with trash, pollution, and greenhouse gasses. I found a song from my personal library that used a sample of Alan Watt’s talking about humans and our relationship to the environment:

“We need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what’s inside the skin, but our whole, total external environment. Because if we don’t experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment. Beat it into submission. And if we do that, comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in. We don’t treat it with love and gentleness and respect…”

The beginning of the song opened up to a bright and natural sound, so I found a utopic scene to use as the first picture in order to give the viewer a taste of what could be. Then, I displayed a series of pictures showing vast fields of pollution and deforestation as well as a couple comics portraying how humans would appear objectively.

To reflect on my second pressure project I think it could have gone better in terms of the quality of the presentation but i think the message was communicated on a basic level. There were some issues with the picture resolution and song audio drowning out the voice of Alan Watts, but most of audience gave was able to understand the intentions of the audio given the visual context. If I could revise this project I would tie in some sort of dynamic/custom elements into the film/audio using Isadora to make the experience more immersive.

Here is a link to the video: https://osu.box.com/s/z7mvzbp36gixwu4ejw7unpl20oz26jqg