In the thirty years since the internet became public, a communication paradigm has developed and facilitated around sixty percent of the world’s population to use the internet and gain access to a wide variety of online social media platforms. These platforms allow users to actively share ideas, express themselves in a multitude of different ways and share personal information with a vast and wide-reaching community.
Outside of this group are forty percent of the world’s population who are unable or unwilling to access these lifechanging technologies with hundreds of millions of people not part of the global economy and global workforce. Poor equality of opportunity excludes the majority of this digitally excluded population from online communities where the digital revolution promotes a new digital enlightenment.
Taking inspiration from our emotional relationship with colour, advertising, online digital marketing and colour field painting, this work prompts the audience to make associations and salient enquiries into their use of the internet and social media platforms. It brings into question the forty percent of the world’s population who have thus far avoided issues of online safety, communication, and relationships, and it asks us to consider the use, ownership and management of personal data by choice or otherwise and ask if we are in possession of a poisoned chalice.