Down with corporate greed!!!

After watching Rip the other day, I was a left feeling a bit peeved by the abuse of copyright law by corporations. I wanted to put a voodoo curse on them all. The film raised serious questions as to the nature of copyright and made some strong arguments in favor of appropriation. First of all, how is possible for someone to own an idea or creation? And more importantly, how is possible for a corporation to own someone else's idea and profit off it? And really, what is the point of owning an idea? Money, of course, but beyond that,...what good does it do for humanity? In the case of medical research, it could be said that copyrighting ideas or research does more harm than good. Cures for AIDS and cancer might have been discovered by now if people were more open about sharing ideas, pooling together their intellectual resources and putting humanity first before profit. Withholding such information while millions of people die needlessly should be outlawed! Now, I'm not saying that people don't have the right to make money off their ideas or creations but its impossible to stop other people from building off them. Once you share something with the world, you can't take it back. It becomes part of the collective consciousness, and doesn't belong to you anymore.It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. (I appropriated that from the Bible. I hope Disney doesn't own the rights to it.) Any advance in human knowledge is built on the knowledge of the past. If that knowledge is to expanded on, we need to be able to access it. Luckily, we're in the dawn of a new information age. It will become easier and easier to share knowledge with each other and increasingly more difficult for corporations to control its spread as we become more technologically advanced.

material girl in a digital world

I've been thinking lately about the impact digital technology has had on the art world and I am most impressed by its ability to create new realities almost magically. Never before has it been so easy to alter visual appearances. The validity of the photographic image can no longer be trusted as artists blur the line between fantasy and reality. Programs such as Photoshop allow for a new and improved kind of hyper-beauty, instantly erasing all flaws and signs of age. Figures can easily be placed in new settings, creating new histories. Filters can transform the photograph's appearance into that of a painting, drawing, or mosaic. It's incredibly liberating to have such power at the tip of your fingers. It's modern magic, allowing for the creation of grand, beautiful illusions. This semester I would like to focus on this idea of altering reality through the use of digital media. I plan to do this through the use of digital photography and Photoshop by taking images of people and objects from the material world and placing them in fabricated or appropriated scenes of a utopian nature to capture that grey area where fantasy and reality blurs, existing together in imperfect harmony.