Kevin Sagara
Kevin Sagara Artist Statement
My work focuses on topics surrounding the evolution of language and technology. Analyzing language and its relationship with a changing society that is becoming technologically focused made me realize how quickly things can change. I realized that on social media platforms, we scroll through our timelines, a screenshot of a certain moment or event. After that moment, a barrage of new information comes through the timeline. This digital landscape has created a highly unstable and fluctuating cycle, where the value of language has been reduced. Every word is spoken and forgotten as a passing thought due to the nature of technology.
The constant scrolling that modern society has become accustomed to provides an experience that I wish to show through my work. The convenience of technology has made society take language for granted. We process thousands of words per day and spend an endless amount of time on our screens. Language has lost its value, despite being the very fabric of life that keeps culture and communities running.
My views on language were inspired by the idea of memento mori. Memento mori is Latin for “remember you must die”. This idea of death and time relate heavily to language. No matter how dominant a language is, it will eventually die alongside society.
This humanlike feature of language leads to the topic of dead or extinct languages. How many languages have been lost over the course of human civilization? What are the possible causes for a language’s disappearance? How is it possible for languages to become extinct in an era that is far more technologically advanced than the past?
The meaning of my work is not to push for an answer to these questions but rather a reflection on what language is. Knowing that the language we speak today could become extinct in the future, makes it something worth understanding. In addition to this reflection, realizing that the power of technology and convenience has regressed the evolution of language through the usage of emoticons makes the expression of words to be all the more valuable and beautiful.