Change of Final Major Project Theme

                                                                            Repurposing of material - the psychological impact of social media

 

My Final Major Project began with the me exploring ‘The repurposing of materials and ‘Wastage’. The reasoning behind choosing this topic was because I had previously touched on it, and at the time I felt my work was not concluded and therefore I had more experimental practice I could develop. Therefore I decided to proceed with this concept in my final Major project. During my research period, I felt I was not generating ideas with depth or ideas that I could take to a next level by adding a component or aspect. Therefore, in result I made the decision to change the theme of my final major project to ‘The psychological impact of social media.’ This decision was made based on the reaction I had to watching ‘Social Dilemma-Netflix’ and the mass creative interest it sparked for me.

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For my previous theme I Initially began by looking into Plastic wastage, Commercial wastage, and Commercial packaging and how industries are getting involved to decrease the effect on the climate these factors have. I did this by conducting statistical research, and supermarket schemes that have been produced to decrease plastic usage. I also looked at various artists who have used factors such as environmental damage and natural material within their work, such as; Laurence Vallieres, Mark Dion, Olafur Eliasson and more. During the course of my research, I began brainstorming thumbnail  drawing in a graphics style, illustrating the mass wastage we produce as a nation, of which I got a lot of inspiration from ‘Paul Scher’s’ environmental graphic works. I became uninspired and lacked visual ideas for innovative ways of communicating my concept, while producing these thumbnail sketches. Personally I didn’t think my concept was being executed correctly and visually my work had no depth or ways of grasping an audience’s attention. Therefore, I changed my Final Major Project theme.

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My current theme of ‘The psychological impact of social media’ was initiated to me after watching a Netflix documentary called ‘The social Dilemma’ which as a documentary revels to us ‘Why we feel such a obsessive appeal to social networking.’ Therefore my final major project is based around that concept ‘Why have we all accepted the addiction we have to social media and technology?’ Therefore, from this point I went onto researching the impact social media has had on generations it was introduced to at a early age along with the feature with in social media that draw us into spending more time on the apps such as; algorithms, notifications, suggestions and more.

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To conclude by changing the theme of my final major project I was able to create new and innovative ideas, which I could develop further and to a higher standard by using my research to contextualise my practical work, I felt I could be more conceptual with this theme and less explicit which was something I wanted to experiment with. Additionally, I could produce more ideas from ‘The psychological theme of social media’ and I felt the ability to reflect on a theme that has not been explored with in art as much as my previous theme choice. Lastly the concept also has a high relevance to the current effects of ‘Lockdown’ and how the pandemic has highlighted negative and positive effects of technology and social media as  whole.