So I tried the mosaic idea and it wasn’t really doing anything I didn’t hate, so I went back to the layered idea that I was working with with the forest piece based loosely off the work of Idris Khan. I’m actually very happy with how the forest turned out. See here, here and here, but I didn’t feel like it pushed me as much in terms of creativity and skill, so I wanted to try other things once I finished it.
I spent one workshop day in class working on this image of an octopus that I mentioned in my last blog post, but ultimately scrapped it because I wasn’t happy with where it was going.
So here’s how my layered piece using Mark Zuckerberg as the subject came out, but I still wasn’t happy with it visually, although it was more approaching the meaning I wanted with the mosaic piece.
I got distracted somewhere in the middle with the stress of my personal finances and made a few versions of a piece that also imitated Khan’s work, entitled Debt, in which images of various sample billing ledgers were used to create a chaotic piece that embodied my anxiety and frustration. Although, I’m unhappy with any of the versions, I’m documenting my process here, so I’ll include them for the sake of completeness. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Finally, I went back to my idea mentioned earlier of a composite portrait. Although it may not immediately be as visually pleasing as the forest piece, I feel that it’s a more significant work. The purpose here is to show a layered person – we’re all multifaceted and it’s important to remember that there’s more to a person than just one side of them. In this piece, I strove to capture things such as public persona juxtaposed with a more personal, private or relaxed side the subject. This takes into account perceived personality and usual appearance, work ethic, how time is spent and divided between work and leisure and other such important issues of a person’s life. I chose Mark Zuckerberg as the subject not only for the reasons mentioned in the last post, but because there is such a conflicting public perception of him as a person, entrepreneur and businessman, not to mention the privacy issues that are constantly coming up in terms of Facebook and the line between public and private faces that many people worry that the social network blurs.
The final work is entitled Pieces Form the Whole, and the title is appropriated from the song of the same name off of the score for The Social Network film. (You can listen to the track here on youtube.)
Disclaimer: Individual images for the “Forest of Trees” piece were gathered from stock on deviantArt and can be found at the following locations: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Pictures of Mark Zuckerberg and sample billing ledgers, as well as components used in the octopus piece were gathered via Google image search and Bing image search and I didn’t save the URLs. All images were appropriated and I can only take credit for the final work and not the individual images that make up the components of the work.
rotato faster bananba 
