Rose-Colored Glasses

Presenter: Melissa Torres

Presenter Status: Undergraduate student

Academic Year: 20-21

Semester: Fall

Department: Philosophy

Funding Source/Sponsor: SYRCE Symposium

Screenshot URL: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1qE_5o8iISbgStEmo3yYviqic5iWmpsbe

Abstract:
My project “Rose-Colored Glasses” started as a question: “What do you remember most from the eighties?” I asked this question to several different people who grew up as kids and teens in this decade. The majority of the answers were related to music, fashion, movies, and technology. I noticed that each individual answer did not include anything on what huge historical events were happening during these years, including the well-known disasters like Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion. I related those answers back to the lessons on Reality versus Simulation and started to explore what sort of distractions were at play during these times to keep people from fully immersing in the reality of what was happening in the 1980s. Pop culture played a huge influence that even though there were violent historical events and disasters, pop culture was still what people thirty years later remembered most. For my project, I collected a combination of photographs of historical events and images representing 1980’s pop culture. I placed the pop culture images, vivid with color, within the lenses of the red frames and outside of the glasses I placed the photographs of the horrific historical events. My project represents what many people in the 1980s focused on to avoid the harsh realities that were occurring all around the world.