Prospectives

The first presenter of the panel played his video called 'Unattended Baggage,' which was a short narrative about a faceless family man who makes a bomb in his garage and leaves it in a public place.  According to him, the goal of the video was to try to humanize a terrorist.  He did this by making him seem like he lives a normal, Americanized life.  He makes coffee, has dinner with his wife, and makes a bomb in his spare time.  He purposely shows no faces and as few details as possible about the actual person to avoid any stereotypes, so the audience sees a human, rather than a person of any race.  He wanted to show that a terrorist can come from any background and doesn't always look like how many people think they look like.  The next piece was a video game for ios devices called 'In a Permanent Save State.'  The game depicts the afterlife from the point of view of dead Foxconn workers who committed suicide because of working conditions and bad treatment.  It deals with real people, events, and politics, and is meant to be a serious game rather than just pure entertainment.  Because the theme of the game deals with controversial human rights violations, apple pulled it from their store.  He didn't go into detail about his intent with making the game, but I imagine that the topic of the dead workers was meant to call attention to the situation to hopefully inform people of what the game is about.  The last person's piece was called 'Art in the Info Epoch."  It was split into 2 parts and was meant to show similarities and differences of people in two groups.  The first was pictures of prisoners who's faces were trisected and always mismatched with different parts of someones face, and the second was the same thing but with politicians faces instead.  His intention was the show that a lot of these people represent similar ideas, images, or lifestyles, specifically the politicians.  He talked a lot about the occupy movement so it was clear he didn't like most politicians and rich people of power.  The piece was meant to show his opinion that a lot of these people have the same agenda, or the same ideas.