Ellen Sandor & (art)n

This work embraces the notions of virtualization, panorama, symbolism, scale, and interactivity to create three virtual towers. Has human nature changed in twenty-five hundred years?

The Tower of Babel expressed duration of time and transition. The tower climbs up to define humankind in terms of the ability to recognize each person s own power and struggle to achieve this. It is a metaphor for contemporary life for the individual to achieve greatness through his actions. A tower represents aspiration: it can always go higher, The destruction of a tower is the destruction of a dream.

Yet a tower is hierarchical: is higher better? In a vertical panorama, does hierarchy exist? Is the highest pixel the best pixel? Has human nature changed in one hundred years?

Bridges represent communication in our present 21st century—a merger of the past, present, and future. The bridge is a negotiation between power and control. Like the tower, it is optimistic: the two sides of the river, or cliff, or overpass can be joined. The two vertical towers depicted are individual monuments aiming for vertical panorama, expressed by poses while morphing and being animated. The imaginary third tower consisting of text and the two disjointed sections of a monitor transmitting fire spanning the center represent a virtualization—a highway dividing the streams of text, and a bridge across the centuries. Issues of power and control are further explored in the depiction of the Berlin Wall and surveillance by helicopters. One may think that the Berlin Wall was a temporary existence; younger generations may observe it as a virtual phenomenon. Contrasts are represented by the chance of continuation and the unpredictable destiny of extinction; e.g., the slower deterioration of monuments such as Stonehenge and the immediate destruction reflected by the exploding tank and blazing fires. Will human nature change in twenty-five hundred years?

The bridge (Brooklyn Bridge) represents passage of time, not of value the Twin Towers in the background ask the question: is it worth it to build more towers while bridges are deteriorating and collapsing?

If bridges create the network between towers in the physical world, towers create the network for the virtual world—the broadcast tower, the satellite tower, the cell-phone tower. As towers become higher and higher, do they reduce the need for bridges between them, or do they intensify that need? Will the future be a network of towers, interconnected by bridges? Are bridges our new communication tools? Are new communication tools our bridges?

Bridges can connect us, bring us together, and allow us to cross an obstacle. Somewhere on this highway running through us is the pixel between the past and the future, between adversity and hope, between survival and disappearance; its pavement is the new digital canvas on which we map our lives.