“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
The denotative meaning I was trying to convey with this piece was complete chaos and a lot of ambiguity. When I was trying to decide on a focal point, I decided use the bright yellow smiley face towards the middle of the page, because this reminded me of emojis, which have become an acceptable form of communication of sorts in our society today; which, to me, serves as a representation of this quote and the information overload that is our society. My goal was to create a kind of outward spiraling eye-path by adding the two images of a cartoon yelling directly at another plugging her ears; which is a further representation of information overload that I was trying to portray. However, I didn’t want the eye path to be too clear because my goal was for this piece to lack any traditional order and to leave the viewer somewhat confused. As the right spiral eye-path continues, I placed an image of a hammer above a brain clip art with a smile in order to convey the meaning of chaos. Next, I decided to create a complementary color scheme paint and pastel chalk in blue tones, in order to contrast with the yellow focal point. I then decided to incorporate shades of pink and green, another set of complementary colors, which are analogous to the blue-yellow scheme, in order to further convey the chaos. I felt these two color schemes that work together while simultaneously contrast created a paradox that furthered my meaning. I then used ink sporadically around the page to try to calm down the vibrant colors and make it a little bit less chaotic; I also felt the ink served as a way to emphasize certain areas.
This quote really stood out to me and helped me arrive at the connotative meaning I wanted to convey. We are exposed to massive amounts of information virtually every waking second of every day that often times its almost impossible to even process what we’re looking at. When I read this quote I thought of how often I catch myself scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, having “liked” several posts, but with little recollection as to what exactly I just looked at, despite having seemingly expressed a public liking of it. This quote reminded me of the data visualization unit we previously covered; that information is really just words, numbers, or characters on its own, and is virtually useless without any meaning or order attached. Our society has become so saturated with information that it often takes away from the meaning of it; we have caused a great deal of information to become almost useless. I wanted this piece to symbolize the importance of taking a step back or disconnecting, because with the influx of information we are exposed to, it is very difficult to make any sense of it, or to find any meaning from it. I added various hashtags around the page as well, with pretty meaningless words following some of them. I felt this helped portray my connotative meaning, as hashtags are often mindlessly typed on social media in attempt to increase buzz surrounding a certain topic, or to make it “trend.” Hashtags in many ways perpetuate the mindlessness our society exercises when it comes to viewing endless information with little effort to attach meaning to it.
