Experiencing Multiple

This was exciting to me with regards to Feed because the underlying theme in the novel is that people are so caught up in the media and their own personal space they inhabit that they are oblivious to the important issues going on in the world.  The same world that they live in.  “Ignorance is bliss” is another way to put it…but is that bliss really a good thing?  That’s what Feed forces the reader to question.  I connected so directly with this theme because often times I get too caught up in my schoolwork, or personal life that I am ignorant of the people who are really suffering and struggling in the world.  I am ignorant of the majority of people in the world who don’t have access to the technology and opportunities that I am exposed to every day.  This frightens me sometimes, which is exactly why Feeed is frightening.  In contemplating this, it helped me focus in on what I wanted to have represented in my blox: which issues stood out to me from the novel that are being ignored.  Which layers of reality are people burying underneath their simplistic world of the feed.

Adapting Multiple

In adapting my blox for multiple, I started by really focusing on what I thought the underlying issues were in the novel.  I had to get in touch with, essentially, horrified me the most about Anderson’s society.  Because I am an objective observer looking at the society without being jaded by the feed like everyone in the novel, I can see what everyone in the novel just ignores.  I thought distinctly of three different things.

The first issue that I can see happening but everyone in the novel is blind to is the fact that only 70% of the population has had a feed installed.  That means that 30% of the population is cut off from what runs society and is essentially suffering and starving.  They are considered unworthy and insignificant to the majority of the world.  Most people (who have feeds) are unaware that there is a portion of the population that does not have the feed.  It is not even something that they consider.

This leads to the second thing that came to mind: the fact that there is a significant amount of people in the world who are starving and going unnoticed.

The third horrifying aspect of Feed is that the world is so toxic to live in now that people are developing lesions all over their bodies.  To compensate for this and deal with it, lesions become a fashion statement to the point that people are getting synthetic lesions surgically implanted onto them.  Instead of addressing the serious medical issue that is a result of the toxic environment, the people in Anderson’s novel mask their anxiety by embracing it.

Cornell and Multiple

To turn the images that stood out to me in the novel into a blox, I thought about the significant issues being barely visible amid the dystopian wasteland that the world has become.  So I made the entire blox be an image of a wasteland.  Embedded within the wasteland are an image of starving people, a cluster of red lesions, and a graph representing the percentage of people with feeds compared to those without.  I then made these images more or less translucent, so you can just see them through the wasteland.  This is what it ended up looking like:

Multiple Blox