First project for my new art class. The class is 1601: Time and Interactivity, and its basically an intro digital art class featuring Photoshop, Flash, Final Cut and Audacity.

Anyway, I have a pretty awesome teacher named Meng (she's from China and graduated from the Beijing Film Institute which is like the most prodigious film school in asia) and she's been showing us tons of photographers and some great Andy Warhol stuff I'd never seen.

So this image is inspired a LOT by the artists I saw in class - in particular the Surrealist photographers of the 20s, French Photographer Alain Fleischer and Hungarian artist Moholy Nagy (whose photogram work is like mind-alteringly good).

My interpretation of my self-portrait is that there is no true 'one' representation of a person. If you take one photograph of someone it only captures part of 'who they are', and as people we usually only see fragments and glimpses of one another's 'true' selves. And bringing that into the digital medium you never know how much someone is digitally manipulated to further remove their representation from the 'truth'.

So in my self portrait I didn't try to represent my 'true' self, I tried to comment on truth and imagery itself. I'll admit that my brief exposure to cultural studies class influenced this a bit too. (signifier vs. signified, discourses etc.)

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approx. 4 hours

Photoshop

2008
(oops, I signed it '07... I'll fix it later...)