Inequality Comparing Project Brainstorm

/ 31 August 2013

In the summer of 2012 I was in Europe with my dad and grandmother for two weeks. One of the stops we made while driving to Vienna was at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Standing in one of the buildings where Jews (and others) were housed led me to think about just how many people were packed into those spaces and how vastly different that number is from the population of virtually any of the residence halls at CSB/SJU.

One possible theme for a series of images could be looking at this, and other, vast inequalities regarding things like space that leave us living far more comfortably than our neighbors of other places and/or times. I would make these images with the unequal half being photos either I took when in such places or find under CC licenses online while the half comparing to our residential living on campus would be photos I take here as I start work on this project. For the purposes of leaving something to smile at amidst what otherwise is just a sobering series of images I would utilize the drawn style I used in my final project for the first class in appropriate ways.

One image could be the example from which this theme was drawn, with me taking photos I took at Mauthausen residential buildings and putting them right alongside photos of where I’m living on campus. Each half would have an exterior view layered and slightly translucent above an interior view. Likewise, each half would contain the staggering facts illustrating just how unequal the situations are.

As a series I would probably aim to do 3 or 4 such comparisons. Perhaps another topic would be food and water access, but beyond that I still need to come up with the other topics to illustrate in such a series.

With the project guidelines not yet handed out for the first project of the Computer Art class I cannot be sure that this project idea will come to fruition any time soon, but it would be a powerful project to do if the freedom to do it arose.

Discussion