As a father of a four year old I can see how easy it is to just turn on the digital nipple and have it amuse my child. Luckily my wife and I are in agreement that this is not the way we want to raise our wonderful little man. While I was growing up my parents would not allow television except for when we all watched as a family or on a Saturday mornings when they needed a lie-in and a rest from us. Having only one channel to choose from also helped. But after lunch we were thrown out, whatever the weather to play in the forest and network with whoever was around. I know times have changed and I wouldn't just kick my son out the door ... Yet. but also for sure I wouldn't let him be watching mindless crap which made him dumber.
Televised
But for adults it's the same and there is so much tripe that I am sure is doing terrible damage to their minds and social interactivity. There is a popular English soap Opera called Coronation Street where several years ago a character was sent to prison for fraud. The viewers were very upset by this and signed partitions to have her released. Even the Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the home secretary to look into the case of the 'Weatherfield one'. This is not a joke but a great example of when that box in the corner is a danger to all of us. It's not real. So, peruse wisely.
Screen time
It was 2006, the year before the Iphone. A time when the television still had a strangle hold on how people were entertained. Alan Magee and myself were in Jelgava, Latvia for an international ice sculpture competition. First we had to do a solo piece, my one I documented here and now we were on to the doubles and trying to decided on what to make. Alan and I had been arriving at similar ideas in our own personal art interests and spent lots of time chatting about the fears we had of all this media which people consumed and thought it might be an interesting subject for the sculpture.
We are not against television or being a fan of certain shows but to us it seemed that people were starting to loose their grip on reality and children in particular were less inclined to be playing in a way that we had as children.
Our piece was very much a simple visual image like a cartoon, what you see is what you get type of sculpture and looking at it now it was a good approach to get to our intended audience.
A child sits on a seesaw with a television on the other side. That was all she wrote.
The making of
To make it was a challenge as the temperature was above 0c and we had a lot of stacking to do. We pulled a few all-nighters as the temperature dropped below 0 and the blocks could be frozen together and carving could be done without getting too wet.
The seesaw and child were stacked and carved first making the whole sculpture look finished and the child appeared to be lonely little soul playing alone. I gave the child the look of a Gary Larson comic strip character because why not? Having a baseball cap and a propeller on top gave it a bit more interesting silhouette.
The TV was then built from sheets of ice to make a hollow box, We thought it best to keep the weight to a minimum as we were not too sure if the seesaw arm would support it. The cats ears were slowly whittled from shards of ice, a very delicate process which had several false starts. Just before the carving time was over we lifted it into place and the whole sculpture took on a different, intended meaning.
The Bold and the Beautiful
We named the sculpture after a famous American soap opera that was strangely very popular in Latvia at the time, thinking that as a name it worked on two levels, one as a direct reference to the show, getting our adult viewers to think about their own TV watching habits, how It can lead to skewed sense of reality and two as a comment on children's relationship to media, is this a future we want for them?
We were awarded first prize and to be honest were quite shocked. Our piece was not the most beautiful sculpture and in lots of ways quite simple to construct but maybe it was that it had a lot of bold meanings behind it that the judges could relate to.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
You may kiss the bride - ice sculpture
Loop De Loop - snow sculpture
Toy Nativity - sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite