DEL/SYS_32 This project began in August of 2022 as an exploration between digital and physical art making. I found myself looking at my paintings and photographs with a different set of worth and craft. I began making images that focused on the human form and altering them like I would paint a painting. Taking a contemporary approach to the standard glitch effect, I experiment with the human figure wondering how it can be manipulated and transformed in the digital space. It’s no new concept that the world is becoming too consumed with technology. We live in a society that continually pushes us to use technology in order to participate in said society. Our cell-phones have become an extension of ourselves, allowing us to communicate and interact with the world around us. Social media has allowed us to become someone other than ourselves. Technology is now no longer a way for us to expand our individual lives, but escape from it. I asked myself what would the world look like, when we stop consuming technology, and technology starts consuming us? As technology progresses we eventually have to submit ourselves to it in order to continue participating in the world around us. In the early 2000’s, the first round of smartphones were rolling out that enabled access to the internet. Now we all have those little computers in our pockets allowing us access to the entire world. Today, rather than staying connected to the world, we use this technology to escape. An escape from the intrusive thoughts, the feeling of truly being alone, the confrontation of ourselves. And someday the option of having a permanent escape from all of that and more may not be so out of reach. Discussions of “uploading” our brains to the internet have already begun. Scanning and cataloging every thought, feeling, and memory a person has ever had and storing it in a virtual reality. But can the human experience really be documented to the fullest extent? Can a computer system ever truly log every synapse fired? The feeling of time passing? What your favorite food tastes like? What would happen when our virtual-selves realize that they are not actually human? What would it look/feel like when that digital space starts to collapse? This body of work is surrounding these questions I’ve been asking myself.