Artists' Statement

In Modern Regression, we wanted to compose a social critique of today’s lack of true communication among people. All around us, we see technology as an ever-present ingredient in our day to day lives. The means we have available to connect with one another are more abundant than in the past but the degree to which we are truly connecting is more paltry than ever before. We were especially inspired by the words of George Carlin in his piece The Paradox of Our Time—“We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.” Technology has become such an integral part of our modern society that sometimes it is the only context in which people can relate to one another. As a global community, new technologies are introduced to the market every year, carrying significant societal impacts in terms of how we live our lives, how we interact with others, and what we value as important. Text messaging is one of the many modern avenues of communication, and we wanted to focus specifically on this facet of our modern, technologically dependent society. While there is an ostensible sense of progress created with technological developments, we wanted to shed a light upon the byproduct of social regression within our modern society.

We convey our message particularly with the use of blurred faces, deliberate boundaries, and showing the ubiquitous presence of technology in our lives. We chose to use text messages to accompany our photographs, mimicking this modern form of communication and exhibiting the casual nature of how we relate to one another. We try to press that, while this has become the norm for the sake of convenience or efficiency, the way that we communicate has become the real barrier in our interpersonal relationships. The tone of one’s voice and nuances in facial gestures determine our interpretations of the people around us. Without face to face interactions, we cannot know a person’s true reactions, feelings, or intentions. The ties of humanity are severed; who we are, our ideas, and our ideals are reduced to the oversimplified representation by the staccato blurbs in which we communicate. The world surrounding us becomes a mere haze as we come to know it by technological means alone. We need to stop and smell the roses.