Tower of (In)Equality

In creating this piece of glitch art, it took me a long time to try and come up with, at first just even a picture to try and mess with, and then what my meaning behind it all would be. So, in the end, I was inspired through a documentary I had taken a look at in a separate class. The doc was titled “A Short History of the Highrise,” and in the film, there is a mention of the biblical tower of Babel. I found the idea of the tower to be very interesting. The idea is that everyone in the world could come together and live as one people, with one language, and one community. That was just the idea, though, as God destroyed the tower in order to create a kind of separation among people, because if everyone is in complete unity then there is no hardship, there is no struggle, and therefore no motivation to strive for greater things. I picked the picture on the basis of the central idea behind it; this idea of being a unified community. I did this because I am from St. Louis. In other words, I am from the current focal point of inequality in our country. During these tough, shocking, and often dismal times of a renewed observation of racism in the community, I thought that this Tower of Babel ideology was rather prominent. In creating this glitched image, I wanted it to look jagged and sort of sectioned, resembling the people of my city and how we have formed separate groups with prejudices on the others. However, I did not want to distort the picture past a point of complete non-recognition. In this way, we can still see what the picture is supposed to be, and that idea of equality and unity, yet it is overshadowed by this faulty image of segregation and separation. Now, I must reference again what I stated earlier while describing the story of the Tower of Babel. We were meant to deal with hardship and difficulty. Right now, this racism is that hardship. We cannot turn our backs on our fellow humans simply because they are a different color than ourselves. This idea can also be noticed in the glitch art, as not all sections are the same color, just like the people of the community. I might even go one step deeper into the picture and point out that there are some pixellated square section throughout some of the different colored sections. Now, although this was not an anticipated or planned effect, to me, it sort of symbolized the fact that throughout our different groups, most of us are good people, but there will always be some individuals that do not believe in unity or progress. These people believe in a strict set of norms and are just unwilling to evolve with the times. The unfortunate part of that fact is that sometimes these people are members of the higher-ups in a community.