Jamie Kay

The 2016 word of the year according to the Oxford Dictionary is "post-truth," an adjective defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." This work investigates how we construct and inform our sense of "the real" through motion and interactivity as a metaphor for our continual transformation of being. This transformation is explored conceptually through how we position ourselves in active and passive stances with regards to our relationships to civic duties, ideology, the way we interface with notions of identity, how we engage a mediated or natural environment, and how we can shape our future amongst the prevailing backdrop of a post-truth paradigm.

That we shape the environment and the environment shapes us is a thematic concept of the interactive installations and video transformations that comprise this thesis. As the audience investigates through multiple contact points, the installation changes to reflect how their activity is interconnected throughout the environment. The meaning-making process is constructed and performed by the viewer through playful acts and physical touch. This aestheticizes and foregrounds how our interactions construct knowledge, identity, and ideology, and how we construct our notion of the real.

This work takes the following as being true: all art contains an informal learning element in some shape or form. Therefore,all art is inherently political.