Digital Rest

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘rest’ and although we tend to think of laying in bed or sitting down, to me rest is something you do to escape the real world, and according to the collins online dictionary rest is “tranquility” or “relief…from worry”. In our society today we use technology as our escape, we sit in our own little bubble, headphones on, our skin emerged in the light from the technology. This will be the starting point for my rest project. Technology as an escape from reality.

During our first lecture we talked about how this idea of humans wanting to escape and create a place that distracted them from reality has been around for thousands of years.

We looked at what Oliver Grau calls ‘illusion spaces’ in his book ‘Visual Art: From Illusion to immersion‘, I cannot find any images of these, but they are basically rooms in ancient Rome and Greece which people visited, the rooms would be painted with certain imagery, sometimes sexual or just normal scenes. People would visit to make themselves in a certain mood or just to escape from there lives.