Final Project: How Long Have We Been Disracted


How Long Have We Been Distracted?




 

My final project, titled How Long Have We Been Distracted, aims to encourage the viewer to come to terms with a crucial part of existential philosophy: that we are constantly running from the fact that despite how much we may ask the universe for a purpose, there is no response. Specifically, we run from boredom, as when we are bored, we begin to question such ideas, which can cause mental crises and anxiety(angst). However, this perpetual escape from boredom often alludes to humans for the majority of our lives. As we live in a state of boredom, it's like a fish recognizing it lives in the ocean without knowing fish live in the ocean in the first place: "Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structures, and overall patterns elude easy perception (McLuhan, 84-85). The collage itself covers my project and consists of people partaking in such distractions or results of humanity's need for more distractions. However, in the center of it all is a painting of St. Francis, who is famous for throwing away all his earthly desires in the pursuit of faith, which alludes to Kierkegaard and other existential philosophers' notion that to escape boredom, we must find something infinitely fulfilling: faith, art, science.

On the physical copy of the collage, the following link is handwritten in the white space: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ofUTs30zICnCazP1rasICT908ut-T9JZPGqP6_mJDcc/edit?usp=sharing. It sends the viewer to an exercise in which the viewer must shock themselves every time they get bored, which is used as a physical display of boredom, as we usually don't recognize when the feeling actually arises.

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