2100 Smallman St. Pittsburgh, PA 15222 | 412.261.7003 | www.contemporarycraft.org
My work is concerned with our relationship to technology in our daily lives. Since 2006, I have started to realize an intriguing contrast in the subtext of historical mosaics and contemporary digital mosaics. Historically, mosaic was a way to reveal imagery and design, yet in our contemporary culture, it is used in an opposite manner - to obscure nudity, obscene gesture, or identity. I found the use of digital mosaic to disguise identity, often seen on TV or online, intriguing, as it directly references and so closely resembles my mosaic portraits.
The Roman mosaics depicted scenes of their daily lives. Scenes such as hunting, dining, and sporting events were images used in the creation of the mosaics. I am also creating mosaics out of our daily lives, specifically online activity. Many of us probably have more than a couple of alternative online identities to blog, shop, pay bills, or maybe to meet people. However, we rarely disclose our real names online. The current phenomena of "You Tube" and "Flickr" reminds us of our strong desire to reach people, yet we are fearful to reveal our identity. By pixilation and abstraction of the portrait, my i-phone portrait installation visually expresses anonymity, which suggest paradoxical/contradictory aspect of contemporary life.
This paradox and contradiction also exist in this particular online virtual world Second Life; where the side images of my relief pieces originated in. Second Life is an online 3D virtual world that is created by its residents. It is inhabited by millions of users from around the globe creating many communities for entertainment, friendship, education, businesses etc. Although users have an option to custom make their avatar in details to visually express their identities, the environment is established to keep the residents’ anonymity. It is a new way of social interaction, and what is quite unique to our contemporary life. By creating three vantage points and exhibiting three images both from real world and virtual world in one relief piece, the work expresses integration of real life and virtual life, and how we weave through these two worlds on daily basis in our contemporary lives.
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Megumi Naitoh
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