What makes us human beings? I think the main aspect of humanity is the combination of a contrast which is naturally inside us all. All of the positive and negative characteristics of human beings, contrast within the subconscious of our minds. But despite the relating similarity in each person, we all have a personal attribute to this contrast.
Exploring at how our basic human instincts influence our relationship with other people, I raised the curiosity of whether it is possible to enhance our instincts or reduce them to make us more powerful and brave in our decisions in life.
Modern technological progression has made us more aware of our own instincts, becoming a place to let intimacy gradually be replacing the human interaction in life. Considering how natural our adaptation is to progression, there is an automatic comfort in our personal access to everyone around the world, more intimately available than ever before and yet present an entirely contradicting realisation of how we have become enclosed and antisocial within our hearts.
How can we solve or at least improve this issue? I think the proof of someone else’s feelings would make us braver to communicate. Therefore I came with the solution to create a skin replacement which will be glowing with sensual colors depending on our emotions. This was moderately influenced under the concept of ‘mood stones’. This allows every human to come up with decisions regarding someone without the frustration of curiosity of another’s thought or judgement upon someone.
For a project outcome I choose to make music artworks as I find it represents emotion in the purest of form.
Muse is a perfect example, I used as my focal musical representation, as their songs give variation of moods and emotions. The best example was taken from their album, The 2nd Law, where I selected six songs and create single covers for them. There is a typological influence of technique with each being made with photography, with the same dark setting and same models. However, each image presents a different expression with body posture. The movements made by the models in each image represent a different emotion, which then signifies the song in relation.
The original album cover is a photograph of the brain taken from the Human Connectome Project, where each colour represents the map of the human brain’s pathways. Extracting each colour separately, I then used those chosen colours to each enhance the expression of emotion in each photograph for each chosen song.
The project is created in layers,starting with the photographs inspired by American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. Using his style in black and white and with the sensual body movements in postures, I used this concept with my two models, one male and one female, and wrapped them with silk to enhance the movements with attempts of releasing themselves from the fabric. As they are combined, they melt together simultaneouslay to escaping from each other. The second layer is the inverted images of a space nebula where the colours from the original album cover were inlayed above. This created the relating emotion for both characters and presented a final series of expressive emotional colour above black and white photography. I felt this depicted that attempt of salvation within our own hearts perfectly in relation to using the audio and initial influence from Muse’s album.
