DISCUSSIONS

The sameness of the sunrise seascape scene brings peacefulness while the everchanging colors are dynamic and keep it interesting. After a while, it becomes deeply moving and resonant, feeling like a portrait of humanity in nature, of people from scattered places, all progressing through the rhythms of the day. These people are hassling through the day but nature remains the same. Everyday worries suddenly feels small and irrelevant.

The process of watching the synthetic sunrise is intriguing, I keep asking myself where is the sun currently rising from the horizon right now? I feel a deep connection with someone from far away who is experiencing the sunrise right now. We are sharing the same sunrise view at the moment. What does time mean? They are just numbers that are made for easier communication. Timezones seems so artificial as a human construct as we look at the earth shadow moving across the globe and bringing light to different areas.

The sunrise piece can run indefinitely pulling color from the instant sunrise pictures from around the world and the same applies to the map. However, the colors and pictures stay the same when there are no new pictures being uploaded, for cases when the sun is rising over the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific Ocean where there are few people who can take pictures of the sunrises. How do we account for that? Does it mean that the sunrise is not happening right now? How could we ever experience a sunrise from those places? This represents a greater part of nature that cannot be captured by technology, like it is impossible for humans to power over the nature.

This project employs social media channel technologies and methods of appropriation, extraction, and intervention, to explore how our generation and society, interact with technology, especially in the area of social media.

The focus on social media of this project has led to the possibility of exploring subjects that can be collectively constructed. I take the practically infinite quantity of sunrise images on Instagram to collectively construct a constantly changing portrait of nature. The work is an accumulation that navigates collective expression in society.

I try to address how differently an image functions on the Internet than in physical time and space, specially the shifts in meaning around the subject when transcribed to social media. The sunrise is a very dynamic scene and yet is so universally photographed. I have heard an audience member comment, ’I feel like I have seen this picture before’. Are the Instagram users still expressing their creativity through photographing sunrise? Are they just trying to capture a typical sunrise that happens every morning?