Art as Extremes: Black Mirror

Over Thanksgiving my Grandfather was telling me about a social credit score China uses to control its population. It reminded me of a clip from an episode of Black Mirror a classmate played. I found it (Nosedive) and showed it to my grandfather. It depicts a world where your social status is directly tied to how people rate your social media posts and your interactions. You can even wear contacts that tell you what rank people are on sight. Housing, rental cars, and employment are all determined by your rank. The main character is a woman desperate to bump up her rating who ends up having the worst day possible. The climax is when her sanity just breaks in public.

This world felt too extreme to be real. My grandfather was legitimately uncomfortable with it. We stopped halfway through to eat lunch and he declined to watch the second half because it was too scary for him. What “Nosedive” did was take something to the highest degree and push a concept as far as it would go. Our reality would never reach that point, but it’s useful to explore in fiction. Taking something to an extreme can help us reflect on a subject we normally don’t give focus to. When it’s blown out of proportion the benefits and problems of that something will become abundantly clear. Fiction is the best hypothetical space for playing with, stretching, and exploring our own reality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erica Gamester - Language and Poetry

For our optional homework assignment, we brought in poems to share with the class and reflect accordingly. I brought in an untitled poem by rupi kaur from her book, Milk and Honey …. (note: she prefers her name lowercased) "i want to apologize to all the women  i have called pretty. before i've called them intelligent or brave. i am sorry i made it sound as though  something as simple as what you're born with is the most you have to be proud of when your spirit has crushed mountains from now on i will say things like, you are resilient or, you are extraordinary not because i don't think you're pretty. but because you are much more than that - rupi kaur" The first notable aspect of this poem is the informality of grammar. The lyrics within the poem are seemingly sentences that separate over lines and random periods. However, this informal style is reflective rupi kaur's poetic style and cultural upbringing, as Punjabi langu...
Read more

Beauty of Simple Worship

Tonight I witnessed something truly beautiful. The campus ministry, Cru, gathered in the chapel full of new faces and fresh first year students. I was running late, but when I arrived I did not feel late at all. I felt overwhelmingly welcome, included and invited in by new and old friends alike. Community is a truly beautiful privilege in life. I walk through the doors and the worship team was leading the filled room in song. There were no microphones, but we were going to lift our voices and our instruments to glorify Jesus regardless of technical difficulties. The night went on and the speaker delivered a message on the call to love Jesus and to love each other, which is a beautiful message in and of itself. However, the time came to close in song. This was when I recognized something spiritually greater than myself, while still not of its own divinity. In this time I experienced the biblical meaning of church. Again we stood to lift up the name of God. I closed my eyes, for I did no...
Read more

Taylor Duffy - Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art

11/30 The part in reconsidering the spiritual in art that really struck me was the quote that said, "It was an artistic experience of art - a sense of the easy and seamless merger of religious and artistic experience, their inevitable reciprocity." In other words, you cannot have religion without art, and you cannot have art without religion. This made me think of van der leeuw's theological aesthetics section in Sacred and Profane Beauty. He states, "It is completely true that genuine, great art is, as a rule, also religious art; genuine, noble expression of the beautiful is simultaneously expression of the holy." This quote truly explains what art is and should be. It should be a creation of the most raw and spiritual experiences we have in our lives. This at least applies to great or fine art. It should evoke this holy awakening in the viewer. This is why creating art like singing a song or painting a fine painting is considered worship. There is such a ...
Read more