When I began thinking about what I wanted to study for my thesis, I knew I wanted to explore and create visuals that felt close to my heart, even if I was unable to formulate some type of ideological explanation for them (more on this later). On the first day of class, I told everyone that I was drawn to metaphysical concepts like dreams, memories, and the subconscious, and I wanted my work to embody these surreal and atmospheric elements. Yet as the weeks passed, I felt the need to build the theoretical framework to support my interests, and my first process paper was a culmination of the accompanying academic frameworks I was interested in – namely, the disenchantment of the world and the loss of mystery, meaning, and spirituality after industrialization, how we search for meaning today in our technologically-mediated world, and the cognitive processes underpinning these new realms of media ecology. That, combined with the fact that I had a preexisting interest in learning and creating 3d art, resulted in my idea to somehow visualize the complexity in our contemporary interiority.
In other words, I conceptualized my ‘context’ for this project pretty early, as well as the ‘why’ – but as we noted, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ remained. I spent much of my prototype sessions slowly figuring out the ‘how,’ which is composed of two main angles for me: the how to make art in 3d/Blender component, and the how I want to actually display or present this end concept to the world. Regarding the first part, I’ve now spent several hours watching tutorials and creating objects and animations in Blender, so I do feel like I have a good beginner’s grasp of the software. I also had a breakthrough regarding the second part, the how to present my end-product – this is the website concept I shared, which might potentially act like a capsule for my visualizations of various ‘phenomena’ that may occur in our modern media ecology – such as algorithmic intimacy, doomscrolling, aesthetic fatigue, and parasocial empathy, among others. I envisioned it sort of being a “snapshot” of this current moment in technology, what were we thinking about our relationship with technology in 2025? How did it embed into our lives, and what felt normal now? What still felt strange? To this end, I also conducted the survey of my peers, hoping to get some more personalized insight into their relationships with technology (also more on this later).
However, in the past few weeks, I started to feel like something felt a bit off about the direction I was heading. While I am deeply fascinated by the theoretical concept of disenchantment and the search for meaning, emotion, and imagination over mechanization and rationalization, I felt almost like I was more interested in my own personal search for meaning, rather than documenting and visualizing the phenomenon itself. When I began brainstorming and sketching out the concepts for my ‘media ecology capsule,’ I was indeed able to come up with some interesting visuals that spoke to these themes: I visualized a person sliding down a slide composed of ‘digital content,’ representing the sensation of doomscrolling; I visualized a scene representing a prototypical ‘sacred’ space, like an old church, but with computer glow emitting light where stained glass should be; I visualized an abandoned office building with vines growing around old computers from the 2000s, representing the nostalgia of the past juxtaposed with nature overcoming technology, a return to the old ecological worldviews.
Ultimately, these scenes felt very lukewarm to me, I felt as though I was trying too hard to make a “statement” about the modern world, rather than creating the actual visuals I was naturally drawn to. So, in an effort to honor my inner taste and instincts, I decided to start noting down the scenes I just naturally imagined and felt the desire to create my version of, without forcing a theme for the sake of thesis. These were some of the visuals that I noted down: repeatedly, the moon, the moonlight reflecting on a lake. The visual of a dark bluish greenish lake with a pure white swan on it kept coming up. Themes of my own personal nostalgia, my childhood bedroom, curtains billowing in the night. Scenes with fog, mist, and the light at dusk or dawn. Moths, fireflies, butterflies.
Upon reviewing these ideas, I felt like I finally realized the dissonance: I was initially drawn to the idea of searching for meaning in our modern fragmented world, because of my own internal desire for it – yet this did not mean I wanted to visualize the act of searching, but rather to embark on the search and creation myself. Much like the artists and poets of the Romantic era, who responded to industrialization not by depicting alienation, but by creating works that reasserted emotional truth, transcendence, and beauty, I wanted to make something that holds meaning, rather than simply commenting on its absence. In fact, I started to notice many parallels between my project thus far and Romanticism as a whole: the Romantics too were responding to the disenchantment of the world, leaning into emotion, intuition, and imagination over the rationalization and empiricism of their time.
So, this is where I’m currently at regarding the ‘what’ of it all. What if I just focus on creating a piece of art that feels magical to me, that champions the Romantic ideals of emotional intensity, longing, solitude, magic, and dreams, that already sit at the center of my creative practice? Maybe that’s what we really need in today’s digitally saturated world, rather than yet another overt depiction of the technology itself. In fact, even as I reviewed the survey results from my prototype, I noticed that people were quick and uninterested in the technological phenomena, but took the time to expatiate when it came to the one question focused on emotion and nostalgia, sentimentally recounting their childhood experiences – affirming my decision to simply focus on emotional resonance above all.