GROUP MAP 'Where is Digital Art and Culture in your life'

Individually, how I viewed Digital Art and Culture in my life appeared to be more of technologies that I had interacted with in the past, was interacting with now in the present, and hoped to interact more with in the future. However, after discussing with my fellow course mates and eventual group mates, this perception transformed and the common components that stood out in how we as a group perceived Digital Art and Culture in our collective lives was often linked to the technological impact of certain social media and editing technologies on our perception of ourselves as individuals.

Thus, we came up with the idea of mapping out our interactions with different editing technologies and image-driven social media platforms against the map of the ideal of "perfect/ideal beauty" as our interactions with these digital mediums seemed to alter and skew our perceptions in favour of a certain socially upheld ideal standard of beauty.

We came together as a group with pictures that we felt were the "ideals of beauty", interestingly enough all images were of women likely due to our association of the term "beauty" with that of "femininity", cut them apart and then pieced them back together, creating multiple collages of features that make up "ideal beauty". By contrasting them against our own faces, this emphasised how far from the ideals each unique members features were and we chose to highlight this in the form of mapping these changes to be made to our faces in the form of 'plastic-surgery'-esque face mapping lines that link to different plastic surgery procedures and consequently the details of plastic surgery clinics in Singapore. Layered on this map is another map of sorts, a word map, in which terms of digital technologies that contributed to creating these ideals.

(Addition of Week 2 Parlour of Food Futures)
The inclusion of the nutritional aspect on the map can be seen as an extension of the earlier idea in which we mapped out the breakdown of nutritional values of a "perfect" diet/skin/face/etc. diet. This extends as a commentary on the culture of health foods and having a healthy lifestyle in which digital technologies can be used to track one's exact nutritional needs and not only further perpetuate certain ideals in media but also map out the process of how one can obtain such ideals.