In the process of conducting a creative experiment and developing my research questions, I discovered the following.
One of the reasons why my family supports a bloody war in Ukraine is the limited information and inability to work with sources of information. Like Plato's prisoners in a cave, Russian citizens receive only one type of information and do not try to obtain other sources. Twenty years of constant power in Russia have shaped a certain type of thinking. One person vested with power for so long is deprived of a sound vision of the world. Motivating his actions for the good of his country, he starts a war.
“... no system that usurps the autonomy of persons can be acceptable, even if it is in the name of greater social efficiency or the common good. The lessons of history show that humans are too prone to confuse the furtherance of their own interests with the common good, and their subjective explanatory framework with objective fact.” (Jason, 205 p. x)
Specialists in the field of propaganda research clearly describe all the mechanisms for manipulating public opinion. And one of the main tools has become the media.
February 24, 2022, the day the war began, a big event happened. On this day, the Russian authorities announced that everything that people see on mobile phones, TV, and other digital channels it is all fakes and no one knows the truth. So in one day, everything digital was named as manipulated. Russian missiles flying into the residential buildings of innocent Ukrainians were presented in the Russian media as either fake news or as “the Ukrainians themselves are shooting at their own citizens.” My parents no longer heard me, when I told them that hundreds of adults and children were dying, they answered, “You don’t know! They show you fakes there in Europe!”
While conducting an experiment looking for the boundaries between black line drawing, sculpture (wooden stick) and digital drawing, I suddenly realized one thing.
The moment I added a digital black line to the photo, my first feeling was “this is no longer a real, not a physical drawing.” I began to develop this topic and thought that as long as my objects are not photographed or transferred to digital format, I am sure of their existence. But as soon as I photographed them, I no longer have confidence that something in this picture was not manipulated (light, colour, a spot was removed in Photoshop, or something was added).
With the advent of technologies that allow us to manipulate a person’s face, body, and voice in the digital world, we are no longer sure that what we see in digital format exists in the physical world. This is probably what my parents wanted to say to me that these were all fakes on TV. (...But they never doubted the Russian news.)
If our reality is unimaginable without a telephone, the Internet, a television, and at the same time people do not know how to check sources of information, is it possible, for example, to come up with an alternative, truthful language for communication in the media space?
My motivation is not to impose my point of view, but to provide an alternative view of things through the media.
Maybe one day my mother will see this work and understand that this picture was made by me physically, I worked on it for three months in my workshop and even though she sees it digitally it is not a fake. I want to show her favourite film and try to explain that any war, in any circumstances, is not may be justified.
"for my mom"
Is everything digital is manipulated?
Is there something in digital representation that would indicate only representation and not manipulation?!
In other words, how can one communicate in the digital world and at the same time be sure that this is not propaganda and manipulation of my opinion?
If art has always been recognized as an independent/altermative language of society, is there any art that would clearly say, I am physical object and at the same time you see me through the digital I am true in the physical?
For example, like the Lumière brothers when their first motivation was a simple representation of the physical? Or have they already manipulated our vision because they have chosen the object to display?
Bibliography and references
1. Stanley, Jason - How propaganda works-Princeton University Press 2015
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