Connected (Tilkoblet)

We are together, but alone.

Being lonely and being alone are two different things that my project unravels. To be connected to one and other-too little or too much?
This project talks about social media, and how something so un-human is normalized in the 21st century. As time pases by, the overuse of social media/internet can affect creativity of an individual, shorten the attention span, degrade cultural and moral values and over all shrinks down abilities to act confident in place based interactions.

Inspired by a personal fascination about mushrooms and their functionality, discovery of parallels between mycelium and the internet, led me to create visual expressions of this problem. To gain some unpredictability and intuition-a real mushroom was used, from my neighbours garden, to create new patterns and shapes, during the experimental process in production.

Animation itself has its main goal to make the viewer interpret the narrative on an individual, emotional level. Perhaps, spark curiosity, yet at the same time, the project shows respect for the audience, the story is shown in a semi-intuitive way. Project includes metaphors, and symbols, that had come up during research and my own observations. Such as, a circular composition, to show repetition, sounds-to shape time and space, contrast between enlightenment and darkness, the virtual and lonely, and the real and forward going worlds.

Social media was created with known risks and goals to manipulate and globalize communication between friends and family members. People become more lonely, the more they use social media to communicate. A human brain reacts to screen media, mostly the same way addiction functions, a human brain does not respond to connection via chat or screen interaction such as ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, due to evolution through time. It does not take it as communication at all.

This problem could be hard to solve, therefore, I could not give a ready solution to this issue. I could only shed a brighter light, and bring attention to a problem, with unusual parallels in nature. Social media is the center of human life, and the world can no longer be imagined without them. The only way to end the use of social media is to cut them off directly and use the phone for its primary functions.