My brief story explores the experiences of two people stuck in the corporate ladder like the grids of a comic book. The content they consume induces a sort of environmental amnesia, where you can see panels fade to white and blue. When they finally return home, they are surrounded by the patterns of the places they feel the most like themselves, and yet due to the toll exacted by work and constant advertisements and monitoring they are left to just stare as the night closes in on them and the panels shift to black. 

 

The stories are of different people in the same life, who they are changes what happens to them, and what they see.  My work wants to highlight how we can attempt to find our narrow windows of individuality within the structures imposed by the expectations to sell our time. 

 

The comparison of the two lives allows us to look at differences in time, personality, and experience. Each character has a slow morning, bogged down by their own habits, which are drilled into them by their surroundings. How the days change are based on how the person looks at the world. 

 

The person in life 1 is called the drifter. He is too overcome with sleepiness to notice the world around him and moves through life like the ships passing that he sees on his way home. 

 

The person in life 2 is called the dreamer. He finds himself focusing on the moments, like the blue skies, and his conversations with people. His dreams do not fit with the time that was made by our social structures, and his way home is riddled with trouble.

 

As a psychology and art major, I am interested in the way our experience is impacted by our environment. I hope to explore how we can connect more authentically to people by understanding the shared social context we live within.