Arts Journey Project

Before I started this project, I wanted to give significant consideration to the theme behind what I was doing. I wanted it to achieve more than simply a piece for submission.

I have a strong interest in young adults and technology, and the way that they identify with it. It's one of the main reasons I built The Digital Narrative last year; in order to help young adults identify that they are in control of the tools they are using online.

In that project, I hoped that by building stories using online tools, they would identify ways of manipulating these tools. I hoped that young adults would become creative and inventive in the way they interpreted the intentions of the online applications they were using.

With this project I hope to achieve something along the same lines, but in a way that is more personally identifiable.

My first bash at a theme is below:

I've observed that young adults, particularly girls, have a personal identification with technology that has driven us toward a revolution in the way we communicate and socialize. They were the driving force in making make SMS mainstream, amongst the first to adopt the technology for socialization.

Though boys are just as likely to own technology, girls are far more likely to make it a part of their outfit, a part of who they are. Boys are more likely to manipulate it, to bend it to their own purpose, but girls personalise their mobile devices, and many readily admit to feeling as though they have an absent limb when it's not with them. They adopt it into their lives and it becomes part of their identity.

This assimilation is what I hope to capture in my art, through the manipulation of images, and the inclusion of foreign objects into images. The art will reflect the way in which for many young women, technology is more than just a tool, it is a part of who they are.

Unfortunately, many young women still refuse to accept their mastery of this technology. The unique way in which they adopt new technological devices. Though many young women readily send SMS, use Myspace and Facebook and numerous chat applications. Though they may record and share digital images and live in a social digital world ... despite all of this, many still don't identify themselves as being proficient users of technology.

I'm hopeful that through this project, I'm able to build something that helps young adult users of technology recognise the power they have over this medium.