<Truth DeQay>
Richard Jones
<Truth DeQay> explores the pandemic’s effect on society’s relationship with social media; While citizens were re-booting their relationship with nature, they also accessed inexhaustible streams of information, as social media went into overdrive.
Much of the information was factually incorrect but inspired strong opinion.
Social media algorithms don’t distinguish between truth and untruth. The algorithms prey on human emotion and push users into rabbit holes whilst Big Tech capitalizes users’ digital profiles. A model described as “surveillance capitalism”.
The digital boundary, where the natural and digital world’s collide, represents “the decay of truth” and asks the question: Where do we get our knowledge and is it reliable?
The project’s epistemological perspective is a reaction to the rise in conspiracy-oriented groups that are often aligned with populism and operate unregulated
The floral wreath, central to <Truth DeQay>, is composed of a dense point cloud, made from 40 million data points, computed with the software’s algorithm. Though similar to the real-world wreath, the 3-d version created by the software’s algorithm, has obvious flaws.
The “back-ground” video, mostly composed of scenes from last winter’s storms, was captured as the pandemic’s second-wave surged and President Trump attempted to subvert the democratic process.
The soundscape mixes natural sounds and field recordings with news clips and phrases spoken by artificial intelligence bots, that were sequenced into a soundtrack composed and produced by Phil & Jai Reeve.
About Artist
Richard Jones
Welshman, Richard P Jones, aims to show how people are affected by society and their surroundings. Richard has moved from “traditional photography” to explore the digital divide, the liminal zone, where physical and digital worlds collide.
Richard works with photogrammetry (3-d photography), video, photography, recorded voice, environmental sound and print.
His work has been exhibited at DOX, Prague, The Smithsonian, Washington and Senedd Cymru (Welsh Parliament).
Until 2012 Richard worked as a documentary photographer in China and Japan where he won the Nat. Press Photographers Award (USA), Human Rights Press Awards (Asia) and was a runner-up at the UK Press Awards.
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