Ilona Kovacs
Professor Noah Travis Phillips
Internet Art Cultures
May 18th, 2021
The Terminal Exhibition

Throughout the majority of the 360 video The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole I was honestly pretty confused and almost off put. The style to me directly correlated with some of the haunting memes that have circled the internet such as shrek is love shrek is life (which I advise against watching to due its graphic nature and content) and Jimmy Neutron Happy Family Happy Hour (much more light hearted, still very strange energy). Towards the end, I started almost enjoying the silliness and my lack of understanding of the piece. It became a fun, interactive, and immersive roller coaster of weird space, which I imagine becomes even more exceptional in the gallery.

To me, the turning point in this piece was when heavier bass music started playing while a can started floating in toward the viewer up until you are put on the inside of the can... which only became more evident to me with the toilet featured inside of it. The idea of using the can in a can is pretty funny to me. It adds a great level of humor, but not putting it so obviously makes me appreciate it much more.

Jessica Evans provides multiple cases of travel and independent thinking while countering it with content of our ever so encompassing societal pressures. Specific backpacks and logos are still focusing, which is typically driven by those pressures in the same way that we possibly do not choose our own autonomy for ourselves, but simply for others to perceive us in specific ways. This feels especially true to me with the idea of people fronting personalities or personas on the entire which do not match them AFK.

The sound, the visuals, the rhythm, the seams, the colors, everything about this scene screams glitch and does so in a very satisfying and aesthetic way. James Irwin uses code-based distortions to create their glitches, and this one specifically focuses on the terminal effects of radiation on humans.

I appreciate the title using Human Shaped Whole versus what I first assumed to be Hole to emphasize that we are more together, and rather than being missing, we are what actually makes up the perceptions which couldn't exist at all without our human nature.

Was it difficult to create this with a cohesive look considering the scale of artists used?
What sort of central mission were all of the artists going for together?
What is the intention of making the piece 360 and how does that benefit it more than being just a 2D collection?