This digital artwork was inspired by the combination of two visual references. One, cinematic. The other, from the news. There is a clip from an excerpt dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”, one whereby the character Jules – a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson – is speaking over the phone to his boss Marcellus Wallace. “Shit negro, that’s all you had to say!” He retorts, and hangs the phone. While I was on the tube I was reading one of those free no-news-papers that litter the carriages. Those toilet rolls whose only practical purpose is to serve as visible reminders of how society can be easily desensitized and/or even mind controlled through the free circulation of literary and pictorial fodder.
One whereby your physical features are never attractive enough, your bank account not sizeable enough, your job not good enough, your life not worth living. And so on and so forth, filling the sensitive readers’ mind with fear and anxiety or further desensitising those who accept and define this shit as: “Well, it’s just the way things are, then.” The staple diet for any of us modern westernized slaves who think we are free, merely because we have a job and are thus made able to pay our taxes. Those fees that determine our right to exist below those whom we have allowed through our submissive acceptance of the status quo and its socioeconomic model, to feel entitled enough to make a career into leading other fellow humans as presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens.
OK, rantings aside: the story was about a chimpanzee firing an AK47 into an African militia group. Later on a well-made fake video of it appeared on the web. I found the story funny in a sad way and I guess it prompted me to do something creative with it. Though still rough around the edges, it represents my return to making anything “artistic” after a 15-year block, following my Fine Arts and Art History degree studies back in 1996. So I’m very fond of this piece, which came about a period of intense changes for me but more importantly one, which provided me with a practical key to a personalized type of digital art making that still keeps me busy and elusively free.
“The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organised police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.”
Theodore J. Kaczynski | Industrial Society and Its Future