Glass is Massacre

I went to see an animated movie in 3D with a friend a few days ago. Wearing 3D glasses in the theater gave movie-watching a completely different feel. I've always enjoyed the atmosphere of a movie theater - a few dozen strangers sitting together in the dark, watching the same screen, listening to each other whisper, laugh, scream. But as soon as a script across the screen instructed viewers to put on their 3D glasses, that atmosphere evaporated. Each person was instantly shut into a private compartment within the frame of the glasses. Whenever I turned to my friend to exchange a look I couldn't see him, and he didn't even notice that I was trying to get his attention because images were flying into his face, consuming him inside some kind of vortex. All I wanted to do was run at every person in that theater with a pair of scissors and puncture their lenses. I wanted so badly to communicate, to feel that familiar sense of movie-watcher solidarity. When I left the theater I found a bin of used 3D glasses and took a handful so that I could go home and do just that in the privacy of my own room. It felt so good. I felt the way an artist might feel after he or she empties their self into a work. A motif within this project for me has been the image of the universe. A few weeks ago my friend Abigail told me about the images that the Hubble telescope captures...images that are so big they make our entire universe look minuscule. After ripping apart the lenses of my 3D glasses I was wondering what would happen if I had actually attacked the people in the movie theater, what would happen to their eyeballs. I went to Google images to search for pictures of eyes, but none of them looked accurate. I strayed to pictures from the Hubble telescope and realized that at a glance, the tiny lights that compose multiple universes look like the light that escapes from human eyes when they cry. So I pasted sections of a Hubble telescope image to each lens that I removed. Artifice is defined as a crafty but underhanded deception; a trick played out as an ingenious, but artful, ruse; a strategic maneuver that uses some clever means to avoid detection or capture. When an artist creates, the artist builds artifice. The purpose of art is to disguise the self so that it can be emptied. 3D glasses are an example of a physical artifice, a protective covering that traps the movie-watcher inside a universe. When the lenses are removed the universe falls out. That is art.