Day 39 : Work 39. Machine made? phono sapiens.

Are you familiar with this term, “Phono Sapience”? It means the new human who cannot live without using phone. Smart phone only invented around 10 years ago but it is the fastest spreading technology to the world. They say that by 2020 80% of population will have used it.

Image credit from http://blog.lgdisplay.com/2016/08/phono-sapiens/

I saw one Korean Youtube channel in the car waiting for my daughter to finish Saturday Korean school. This professor or academic was talking about the importance of using smart phone and emphasised how the world has already been changed and will turn into. One of his points which made me feel uncomfortable was to ask people not to stop your children using smartphone as they will not have chance to be exposed to the enormous amount of knowledge and get benefits from it. However, it seemed like ignoring the possible psychological or mental damage to the children who are not mature enough to handle another world, which could not be the same as the actual and physical world they are in daily. How many kids will use smartphone only to google knowledge or information? It seems like another blind pursuit of only money related value with numbers we can generate by using smartphone.

Associated with this concern I have been thinking about the future I will have and the work I will create as an artist. Sometimes I feel like I am doing nothing important at all by making these stupid little wearable objects everyday and discourage myself with this obvious question like who cares after all? But sometimes I feel like it will be ok to keep making things and pursue my artistic dream to find identity so somehow I find the way I can contribute to the discourse on art, artists, art work or even art movement. Here is another Youtube I have seen a couple of times by Jia Jia Fei, curator of The Guggenheim museum in NYC about Art in the age of instagram.

Anyway here is one grid structure I will combine or assemble with some colour structure when it is completed. I was quite pleased and proud of the outcome because I thought I have made this very geometric structure quite perfectly enough to be called “machine made”.

midlsteel