Alex Goldsmith VR Project

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexgoldsmith/

I actually did happen to like doing this project. As hard as it was for me. Well I liked the concept of it more than actually doing it. I did my project on Torture Porn which is a term coined by the media and movie reviewers that basically refers to a type of horror film that places EXTREME emphasis on gore, sadism, torture, mutilation, etc. A couple of examples of this type of "genre" would be the Saw Series, Hostel, and the Devil's Rejects  My argument is for people who don't remember the good old days where telling a story was far more important that visuals (i.e. how many reproductive organs can be ground up or ripped off before you want to throw up). It is a topic that I firmly believe in. The hardest part for me personally was choosing pictures that would express my exact belief on this topic without just taking snapshots of really brutal horror movies or finding really f'ed up pictures on the internet. I just wasn't sure how to portray it. But I did like the way I edited some of the pictures. I tried to make my photo stream more of a parody of the concept of torture porn more than anything else. I tried to make the supposedly really gory pictures in the stream really cartoonish. If they look very amateur and silly that is why. I kind of wanted to have a "Kill Bill" sort of vibe to it. Ergo the usage of Photo shop, fake blood, and use of Italian sausages as intestines/brains. If I had to do it again I would try to get more pictures or maybe just more gore to make it all the more ridiculous. For me personally the project gave me a much more visual aspect to work with and I appreciate that I got to be the one actually making a piece of rhetoric instead of the other way around for a change. As far as what it provides viewers, I think that it gives people the chance to look at a piece of art not just as a piece of art, but to have the ability to look at something in a different frame...whether the topic be some thing ridiculously shocking or shockingly ridiculous. It all depends on how the viewer literally views their own angle and I think that is important.