Enrique Castrejon :  Los Angeles, CA

Why Measure?

Measurement gives us clarity and assurance that something is at a certain unit. Measurement turns the abstract into the understandable units, creating systems for order, progress, composition and truth. It shapes our human experience and we are surrounded by it.

Everything in our world revolves around measurements. It's a language to perceive and structure our reality. Measurement is so ingrained in our reality that we forget that we use it everyday in time, value, distance, temperature. We measure to understand and find some significant truth within our daily lives that we monitor.

Apps track our sleep, steps, weight, calories, heart rated, BMI, backing, trading and screen time, etc. We track our likes, comments, and adds from posts in social media forming social capital.  Like in Guy Debord work, "The Society of the Spectacle" "We start to measure existence by how well it can be shown." Schools grade academic performance. companies and governments use statistics, evaluate and regulate. Biometrics in use in cell phones and surveillance cameras. The clothes we are wearing, seat you are sitting on to the architecture we are in...all have measurements.

My work can be a reminder that in our time with all this technology we are data points to track, survey, observe and record. In my work I pinpoint an exact unit of truth from that image to represent the length that connected with others, create the shape, patterns, contour, and help our understanding of what we observe, investigate, critique and evaluate. Like Herbert Marcuse essay "Some Implications of Modern Technology, he tracks how technology reorganizes consciousness. Once efficiency becomes the highest value, everything is judged like machinery. Everything is made to be streamlined, productive, measurable. The danger isn't technology itself, its how we reshape our desires to fit its logic. Eventually, what feels "reasonable" is whatever keeps the system running." My work wants to question the images I choose and investigate to decipher their meaning and reveal truth.

The tricky part is being able to distinguish what is real and what is not especially now of AI generated images that can easily deceive the eye and our sense of reality. This is why being critical of what we see in everyday imagery is important. My work aims to uncover and inform that.