By Abigail Vidals
“What kind of impact is technology leaving on the youth of today?”
This is something Joe Batt, South Puget Sound Community College instructor, has been asking himself. As a figurative ceramic artist, he was able to portray that question through artwork: a solo exhibition he calls “In The Cloud.”
This exhibition showcases the kind of impact he saw technology having on people, specifically children.
This started for Batt in 2007 as an art professor. Teaching a class one day, he noticed his students pulling out their cellphones to take photos of each other’s artwork.
He was intrigued, seeing how different growing up in the digital age was from his own experience growing up.
His ideas for “In The Cloud” emerged from the body language shown when interacting with technology.
“The way that we appear when we are using technology, when we’re watching TV, or just the body language, and also my interest in combining my 3D work with my 2D work,” Batt said.
This new exhibition of “In the Cloud,” can be viewed in the PC Pub Gallery of Art.
The installation allowed Batt to mix up his artwork pieces and create new pieces that are featured in his current exhibition.
“I wanted to make some artwork digitally, which I’ve never done. I wanted to also incorporate and recycle some of the pieces from the show which are analog. So that was a challenge for me… not to do that but to have the courage to print it out and hang it up on a wall.”
Batt chose to title his exhibition “In The Cloud” as a metaphor in terms of being in the cloud. “I wanted to work with that in terms of just raising the questions about where we’re at in the digital paradigm.” The creation of this exhibit was a 5 year process.
Not only is his artwork intriguing, but he is also an artist with a lot of experience on his hands, being a figurative ceramic artist and making artwork for a couple of decades.
Batt is presenting in the Little Theatre at 12:30 p.m., Feb. 8. It’s open and free to the campus and public. A reception follows at 1:30 p.m.
“I’m a little more skeptical of the benefits of technology but I know there are a lot of benefits.
“I don’t think there is a way to know of the impacts on us, but I think it’s probably a pretty healthy thing to continue talking about it.
“For me, my way of doing that is through my art,” Batt said.