Eli Kuzma

In recent decades, digital media and technology have become an unavoidable part of living in the Western world.  From education and labor, to entertainment, commerce, friendship, and even dating, screens have wormed their way into almost every facet of our daily life, replacing more and more of our previously embodied experiences with ones that take place in the digital world.

For most of human history, all of our lived experience took place in a shared, physical reality from which we could not escape.  The advent of the digital world allows us to escape the inconveniences and limitations of that shared reality, existing instead inside a personalized, disembodied world curated for us by an algorithm.

Generation Z was the first to grow up using this technology.  From the very beginning of our childhood, we have had one foot in digital space, and this has shaped the way we as a generation think, communicate, and interact with our worlds, both digital and physical.

For my Senior Independent Study, I created a series of paintings which attempt to capture the unique sense of melancholy which I feel has become endemic to Generation Z.   It is a feeling characterized by isolation, and a chronic detachment from that shared, physical reality which up until recently united all of human experience.  It is the sense of loss and anemoia we feel when we, consciously or subconsciously, realize the ugly truth of that detachment, and it is our cynical, irreverent outlook on life which betrays a deeper longing for authentic, real, and meaningful experiences, as well as a concession to the fatalistic belief that they have become extinct.  This process was both introspective and exploratory, taking inspiration from philosophy, science fiction, myth, and psychology, as well as the work of surrealist artists such as René Magritte or Rafał Olbiński.