Generative Topic

For my generative topic I chose to pull an Idea from new media artist Elibeth Smolarz video Freund Hein. This video explores how humans think about dieing by showing multiple interpretations the act of death and dieing improvised by people of different ages and backgrounds. It was interesting to see that the idea of death for these individuals only varied slightly. The majority of the participants choose between the acts of getting shot, choking, heart attacks and suicide, while some just choose to lie on the floor motionless. The one thing these deaths all had in common was that they were all highly dramatized and overacted mirror deaths seen on TV and in movies, which makes for a humorous display. This video gives the viewer the fascinating realization of just how huge an impact pop-culture images have had on our personal perceptions of death and dieing.

 So, for my generative topic I choose to research death in mass media aspect presented in Elizabeth Smolarz. People are strangely attracted to death and violence and movie industries are making bank off blood and gore. I am unsure why we as humans are entertained by viewing scenes of death but personally believe it is a fascination in the unknown element of how we may die ourselves. To start with I googled greatest death scenes in movies and found some of the most ridiculously unrealistic scenarios, such as the clip presented in the link bellow.

 

BEST DEATH SCENE EVER!!!!!

 

Do movies such as this desensitize our views on death and lead to real life death/murder, or are they more beneficial by helping us conquer our fears of dieing?

Andy Warhol is an example of another visual artist who chose the subject of images of death being presented in mass media in a series of silkscreen prints entitled death and disaster. Warhol collected gruesome images of death taken from newspapers and magazines. During this time the media was flooded with images of the Vietnam war, car crashes and the assassination of JFK. He repeatedly printed a single image to form a grid-like composition and he was quoted in an interview that “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it looses effect.”