One-Time Visit (XC)

I visited Ybor City, a place I previously did not think I would go to much. Ybor is a city that seems to have either a really positive effect on people or gives people a vastly negative outlook. What are the good things about Ybor? Well, Ybor shows nostalgia, history, and liveliness. It is a night-time city, with buildings that served a different prior purpose that can easily be seen. This is where people love the idea of Ybor. How people see it as a bad place is around the idea of safety. Ybor is widely known as an unsafe place but I didn't see it that way. There is rich history that I have read about Ybor city and how it started. Ybor's greatest characteristic of historical nostalgia revolved around the history of cigar-making. That is why my souvenir is a hand-rolled cigar, rolled in the most authentic cigar shop in Ybor.

ML

The New World We Live In

  My project is mainly going to be a short video, made up of clips of my revolt against the technological monster we have created today. It will be a video that shouldn’t be too long in length but the idea behind it is one that will have a following. Essentially an experiment to record people’s reactions, I will be attempting to show them that life spans much further than just the dimensions of their cellular devices.

The title of my work is mainly reflective on the world we live in today, as it has been technologically revolutionized, ahead of where we thought we’d be as a society. Technology is all around us and it has crawled its way into our hands. Nowadays, you rarely focus on this concept because EVERYONE has been consumed by technology. In some cases this is good, in others, bad. But if you sat in a populated location and focused on the ratio of people who are walking through the beauties of life with their heads planted into their phones compared to those who are enjoying the ambience around them, you will be astonished. My goal is to balance that ratio. The University of Tampa itself will serve as the location for this experiment and the only equipment I will need, ironically, is an iPhone.

I am hopeful that people will understand the idea that I am trying to get across here. Technology is a great thing, but too much usage of it will embody us as a society and has scientifically been proven to lead to higher rates of suicide and depression. 

ML