For this exercise I was asked to create a photomontage with a political message.

I have started my exercise by brainstorming some ideas that I might like to explore. I made a mind map.

I wanted to do something around internet privacy and how social media is used to influence the thinking of people at large.

I feel like large companies such as Facebook don’t do enough to police the content that is being distributed through their channels and this changes the way we see the world around us.

I was playing around with some ideas regarding how content is being “served” to us, this led me to think along the lines of a metaphorical connection between content we consume online and eating food.

I’ve created the following collages:

In my first image I used a picture of Senta Berge (1966) eating spaghetti. I thought that the expression was absolutely hilarious and I wanted to use this as the basis of my picture. I have cut her out of the original picture and painted some parts of the image a facebook blue. I did this to reference the social media, making the bowl and the spaghetti this colour to represent the source of the media that is being consumed. I have added some “like” symbols to the plate as if she was consuming this as part of her meal, and some text to the spaghetti to show some of the contriversial topics of today. I’ve added a blue block behind her to create a frame and added the text “Eat Up” to ellude to the fact that we are almost being forced to consume this media nowadays.

In my second piece, I wanted to use a burger, because I see this as a food that is largely irresistible to many. This is a simile to how social media is so attractive to people and it is therefore really dangerous in terms of news distribution. I wanted to stuff the burger with some contriversial topics the same way as social media filled with these.

In my next collage I wanted to represent the same topic in a way that is playful and funny. I used a photo of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and pasted his head on a waiter’s shoulders. I added the poop emoji on the tray almost saying facebook is serving up s**t. I used the facebook font and the slogan “Eat up” like in my other pieces.

In my last piece, I wanted to do something involving sheep as a metaphor for people who follow the herd. I also still wanted to keep on my topic on social media and fake news, so I found a few articles that were discussing some of the actual fake news that appeared on Facebook and used these in the center of my design. For the frame, I used a photograph by Ruven Afanador. I like the symmetry of this photograph and thought it would serve as the perfect frame for my piece. I added the words “That’s so real” and “That’s surreal” to ellude to the fact that we often can’t tell apart fake and real news on social media.

In my head I wanted to create some beautiful looking collages, but at the end they turned out to be quite kiddish, and I’m not too sure if these would be considered as good. I went back and improved my designs quite a few times, but they are still not where I wanted them to be.