Santa Clara University

 

 

For the Contemporary New Media Art Contest, co-sponsored by CSTS, the deSaisset Museum, and FreshBrain, students ranging from 13-18 were asked to create a new media art piece that comments on the theme of "Technology: Hope and Promise."  Technology enters our lives through all avenues: home life, school, music, sports, medical treatments, after-school activities, even our country's defense systems. What assumptions do we have about technology? Will it solve our problems and make our lives easier? Or is there a chance that technology will fail us or bring about a darker side of society? The following entries won the competition; artists’ statements appear below the image.

 

Entropy, 2009

by Miranda Bassett

Artist Statement:  I created this image in Photoshop CS2, with a picture of an old truck that is in my back pasture.  I created the image to show that, while technology gives hope to the future, it will eventually return to the dust that it is made from. Pay close attention to the detail, it is what makes the picture.

Overtake of Technology, 2009
by Alejandro Lobato

Artist Statement:  As I was thinking about how rapidly the world has grown in a technological sense, I thought of the future. If the amount of technology present on the Earth and the number of new functions it performs continues to increase as it is now, I wonder, "What will happen in the next, say, thousand years?"  I took one of the most basic concepts of nature, grass, and created a technological version of it: grass made of wires.  Then I thought about what lives underneath that grass, and I decided to push the message of this piece a little further. I added two worms made with cables (plugs).  This was my vision of the absolute Overtake of Technology.

The Tree, 2009
by Len Chi

Artist Statement:  A tree is a symbol of hope, and the broad technological landscape is inevitably representative of the technology of our world today. Yet for this piece, I wanted to create this image in a totally new way. Many people have taken pictures or drawn trees, but none in relation to technology. For this image, I made a digital photomontage of a tree from satellite pictures of Seoul, my ethnic root and one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world today. This technology in our world has vast potential and is growing wider everyday, just as a tree would do in a healthy habitat. This piece is a fusion of two different ideas. In the end, it emphasizes the potential and hope within technology itself through the classical image of a tree.