The Skin Deep, {The AND}, and Digital Art Form

The Skin Deep is “a creative studio focused on human connection in the digital age”. It is an online space, art form, and interactive media project that offers an intimate, honest, and real look into many relationships and human experiences. And I find it beautiful.

Award-winning writer, director, and storyteller, Topaz Adizes founded the Skin Deep within the last two years. His Cannes, Sundance, and Emmy experience brings a high quality of production, insight, and philosophical value to the project as it examines relationships of all types and delivers their intricacies and beauties to the whole world online.

The Skin Deep includes several sub-projects — so-called ‘experiences’ that allow viewers to soak up the nuances associated with varying focuses and delivery methods. My favourite, {The AND}, presents various relationships (parental, sexual, marital, strangers etc.) through short videos that show each partner answering emotionally telling questions. Revealed are the diversities of motivations, worries, and dynamics that exist between people.

How do people experience love differently? How do people connect differently? What is important to people in different relationships? How are breakups dealt with differently? How do systemic problems like race, gender, and sexual-orientation figure into intimate relationships? How do they change them? How do they hinder them? How diverse are the struggles that face relationships? What are the general struggles that face almost every relationship? {The AND} is a social study, an educational experiences, and a poetic journey revealing the intimate relationships that people of all types experiences. Learn how you are similar and learn how you are different and get to understand and appreciate the intricacies of the human experiences at a higher level.

As a twenty-something without kids and without a wife, I have never had to worry too much about what thirty-somethings are thinking. In fact, I fail to connect with their experience. Here is my favourite from {The AND}:

Adizes’ project can be used as a way to minimize the uncertainty we all experience to some degree. The gulf between what we want to feel and what we think it looks like is often wide and the struggle for many is closing it as much as possible to get the love-life, work-life, and personal-life that we imagine we want to feel. This video shows me what a strong, connected marriage looks like. It helps me to understand what is to come in my life and how to be pragmatic in my relationships. This couple is beautiful and has taught me that marriage is not love alone.

While {The AND} remains my favourite, The Dig, HonestX, and #7BillionSuns may resonate with me more after their releases in June 2016, December 2016, and June 2017 respectively. Another, Senior Orientation connects digital natives in the 21st century to the mindset and experience of those who we love but often forget experience the world differently than us: seniors.

Senior Orientation is just another window into the lives of a group of people many feel it difficult to understand and connect with.

This Skin Deep remains one of my top choices for media. I feel as fulfilled experiencing this project as I do at the art gallery, listening to music, or reading poetry. The connection imposed proves to me that the new art form of the digital age is in online media.