the scene is in the cloud
spring 2023
Medium + Process: Blender, Chat GPT, Illustrator, Photoshop, paper posters
‘The Scene is in the Cloud,’ is an exploration of digital existence through A3 posters. The series seeks to open a dialogue on the digital technologies that inform our outlook and positionality in a world that has stretched itself into the cybersphere.
This project began as a collaboration between me and a good friend of mine, Iyad Abdi. In August, we’d sit at empty bars and have long chats about TikToks, the American media cycle, and the absurdity (and sanity) of our techno-augmented lives. Living in Milan, away from our homes in the US, we’d often talk about where we might move to next. We’d always come back to one debate… ‘where is the scene?’
In pursuing this question, we couldn’t help but feel that the scene was not so much in a New York borough or in a neighborhood in Berlin. In fact, the scene was emerging somewhere amongst the blogs, content creators, X (Twitter) feeds, and Discord servers that had introduced a vast, yet profound set of ideologies and communities into our lives.
In this poster series, I explored some ideas Abdi and I shared about the comfort and discomfort we had from straddling this divide. By using digital tools like Blender, Chat GPT, and Adobe Illustrator, I seek to replicate the digital nature of ‘the scene’ using the paradigm’s very own language. By juxtaposing digitally generated images with the overtly simple format of A3 sized posters - analog, paper, flat - I seek to communicate tersely (and stylishly) the impact digital life has had on our processing of information.
Using ChatGPT, I had a little conversation with the software to see what their perspective was on where 'the scene' was.
The poster for a fictional semiotics course that references Marshall McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message.' It creates an intellectual umbrella in which to discuss the semiotic value of digital images and environments and the way that this has had an influence on our relationship information.
The poster book and its cover were modeled and rendered in Blender, creating the look of a new, university text that is available to buy. The eye is a reference to the cover of McLuhan's text, 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,' which first introduced me to his ideas.
Using Blender, I gave life to glowing human forms that played with prospective, body, and texture in an 'uncanny valley' type of way that's enabled in digital environments. This calls to question our physicality and embodiment in the cyber realms.
In 3three-d modeling software, I was able to create an infinite, never-ending plane. I love the idea of technological infinitude - speaking both computationally and metaphorically - and how it contributes to the justification of our own vices.
