the most profound...

Bryan thought it would be interesting to see someone else's artistic representation of his poetry. He gave me this quote illustrate:  "The most profound achievement of the twentieth century is that you can now live your entire life without ever touching another person." First I thought about a man alone in his apartment connected to the world only via technology. He's sitting on a couch looking at the viewer wide-eyed, hunched over with his hands together in his lap. But such an image would lack context, so I thought of millions of such people each in his or her own little box, like animals stacked in cages. One guy would drive the delivery truck around town, delivering the necessary tangibles to the people in their boxes.  

I thought about people on the subway hunching their shoulders inwards so as not to touch the people sitting next to them. I thought about a boy and girl passing each other on the street and their iPod wires happen to get tangled up; they're frustrated with the inconvenience of human connection. 

I thought about a series of computers connected by tangled wires, but touch is personal even when its virtual, and depersonalized through technology. So I drew the above sketch. It's not that people aren't connecting, it's that we allow something to mediate that connection. It's often technology that we come physically into contact with in order to connect with other people.