Nick Parparian
College Facilities Officer
College of Fine Arts
My work stems from coming to grips with the world around us in a high technology society with electronics watching our every move.
There is a trade off between the benefits and drawbacks of societal technologies. By exposing the inner workings of technologies and surveillance techniques, the viewer is shown how the world around them is working for and against them rather than blindly ignoring how the technology is actually affecting our lives. All of the technology set in place have the ability to help us or control us depending on our ability to understand their purpose and how they are managed.
The participant is forced to subvert the systems embedded in our urban environments in order to see or be a part of it. The viewer is made more aware through active participation in these systems mostly overlooked in our everyday transversals of our space. With a forced perception of reality in order to make one look at the world differently, I am more able to see the detrimental aspect of these products of our age.
The current systems in our society are built on the ones from previous societies. What was once used as devices of war to use against an enemy, governments now use with their own citizens. Every society in history has had methods of social control, but today it can be done on personal level without ever leaving a computer. Today control and power issues are felt on a personal level without ever needing to see the controller, and rules are ingrained into us at a level where we don’t even think about the fact that we are following them. My work ties the technology and relationships of today with ancient ideas from all cultures that these new systems could not exist with out. Directly tethering today’s world with a simpler system that started its possibility.
Contact and Files
Education
Master of Fine Arts, 2012, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Emphasis in Sculpture, and Art and Technology
Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2009, Florida State University,
Emphasis in Art and Technology
Teaching Areas
Digital Media, Sculpture
Research
Sculpture