Baris Meurer
Collaborators: Eva van der Zande, Elvira Shumakova, Emme Dijkhaus
Like and Destroy
'Like and Destroy' was a collaborative event assignment during my second year at the Willem de Kooning Academy. We were tasked with creating an event/installation that communicated communicate our society of the spectacle. My group, Trespassers Will Be Forgiven, wanted to address and visualize the effects of social media on our collective psyche.
For this project, we built a set out of hundreds of images we collected on social media which our performance was filmed on. The subject wears a custom jacket which she shovels colored pebbles that visualize interaction. Over time, the weight of the stones drags her down. This performance was recorded and projected over the installation. Viewers could put on the jacket themselves and take pictures using the background.
Magazine: Trespassers Will Be Forgiven
The magazine component of the society of the spectacle assignment was meant to document our visual research during the semester all the while making a viable and interesting publication. Alongside this, we also had to produce a commercial advertising it. We decided to take this a step further by completely changing the format and feel of a magazine. The landscape and sampling of a macbook computer's visuals was to address the fact that our lives at the start of the pandemic was through the computer. The magazine contains several articles curated around core ideas and concepts during the research. Through small easter eggs and hidden messages, a second narrative begins to unfold. As the reader gets further into the magazine, the computer interface begins to glitch and hackers take control of the device.