OMNISYS 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Artist Statement

Humans are social beings, yet the relentless pace of life, with its mechanical and rigidly scheduled routines, leaves us with little to no time for self-care. This perpetual cycle leads to a decline in empathy; the care shown on social media is often absent in real life. It’s easier to express rage or empathy online than to act on it in person. Basic communication skills among newer generations are deteriorating, making them self-centered, unaware, and hesitant to engage with the world around them, unless it directly affects them. Are we destined to live in isolated cubicles, devoid of genuine human interaction? Will our digital avatars become our true identities? Is this our future? Are we creating machines, or are they shaping us? OMNISYS asks viewers to reflect on these questions as it represents the machines that we made, but that might be manipulating us. Through a series of machines and nostalgic photographs that are both whimsical and scary at once, one is forced to think about the role of machines in modern life, and reflect in a painful way about what we left behind. 

Media and Technique 

The videos were made with photo collage animation technique. All asset images, with the exception of three images from Creative Commons sources, were generated using MidJourney v.5, then edited in Adobe Photoshop and animated in After Effects. The content displayed on the phone screen (Doomscroller’s Delight) was created using an image-and-text-to-video tool within Kling AI v.1.6.

Year: 2025