Humans both shape and are shaped by their world. We construct ourselves from fragments of society we consume, through media, ideals, histories, and choose how to present our identities. We create fixed standards of perfection: the Venus de Milo's classical canon of Hellenistic beauty, cartoon representations of shape and gesture, anatomical diagrams that generalize the body into standardized parts. These references tend to guide how we mold ourselves. Still, beneath these self-designed surfaces, we share fundamental structures and biological architecture. Here the human is customized through a collage of parts influenced by the representations of us we create.
For Yale ARCH/URBN 2000, Professor Bimal Mendis
