Interworlding by Blakelee Harmon
This interactive Augmented Reality project was created using BlippAR. To view, download the BlippAR app on your phone or tablet. Open the app, point the camera at the image(s) below, and tap "tap to scan." Make sure your device sound is on and the volume is turned up. Interact with the augments by tapping. Enjoy!
Interworlding is a collection starting after leaving my home in New York City due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The unprecedented events occurring are humans largest sign and warning to stop living how we are living. The exploitation that the virus has unraveled has brought inequality, racism, sexism, and corrupt policies directly to the masses. In a time when we are all isolated, technology became our only neighbor. The innovations in media technology and platforms have hastened the distribution of ideas and brought these once taboo subjects to the forefront of public consciousness and conversation.
During my four months of quarantine paint was the only way to digest, compress, and somehow accept reality. My energy, my experience, was in a constant state of surrender.The clarity of inequality brought by the Pandemic created a spiral of layers that were unavoidable. I constantly saw the injustice within the boroughs of New York. Positive cases showing up in extreme numbers within communities with more essential workers, lower income, failing air quality and less overall health care. The Pandemic is a race issue. The urges for a shift in the way we operate sustainably exploited the systems of factory farming, deforestation, and use of carbon emissions. The pandemic is an ecological issue. Homeschooling, remote working, zooms, routine, prescriptions, parenting, money, sex, space, clothes, old patterns, trauma, arguments, miscommunication, overcommunication, youtube home workouts, food, no food, divorce, custody, weddings, a whole new world, isolation, Clorox, 6 feet, wear a mask, stay home, in this together, hospitals without supplies, stimulus checks, protests, murders, living on mars. The pandemic is an awakening issue. Toilet paper hoarding, mask fashion, companies committing to any trend to sell and capitalize on the crisis highlight the manipulation within the Anthropocene. At first, there was shame and guilt when I wanted to create using these destructing forces, but there is too much passion inside of me to ignore. More than anything, the works made within quarantine were created with the question of, where do we go from here- where do we pull from? As a believer in collective energy, there is a sense that the pandemic serves us as an opportunity to reframe, remold, shapeshift, transition, reverse, correct, and start again.
Using large scale canvases to reflect the materiality of mistakes in collaboration with new concepts, this collection shows the effort of the human mind. Branching out beyond the physical form requires the objectification of color, and concept in order to move the audience into a post human mindframe. Eventually, with this in mind, art and life as a whole, will become fluid and balanced in a setting that is not forced to either be an object or a subject but as a vessel within the energies among us equally.
Yay!
