21st Century Man

Year of Creation:

2022

Media:

Song + Digital Collage 

Dimensions:

Variable

Interaction Type:

Passive Listening / Passive Viewership

Duration:

3:09

Description:

A dual work—song and digital collage—21st Century Man stages identity as both anthem and elegy. The song unfolds as a mantra of repetition: “I’m a 21st century man,” chanted with the inevitability of time’s passage. Its sonic texture blends melancholy with defiance, sounding like both obituary and rallying cry. The collage visualizes this tension through allegory: a blood-red sun looms behind a wall of brutalist towers, an electric-blue wave surges upward, and a skeletal angelic figure hovers above—a digital Icarus suspended between striving and ruin. The piece fuses temporal anxiety with myth, linking the cycles of nature and history (the wave) to the fragility of modern constructs (the towers) and the inevitability of mortality (the fallen angel). Together, the song and collage ask what it means to declare one’s existence in a century obsessed with futurity, knowing the 22nd will not arrive for us.

Core Question:

What does it mean to live—and to be remembered—inside the limits of one century?

Loop Analysis

Structure: 

Temporal Identity Loop

Definition: 

A recursive system where identity is affirmed (“I’m a 21st Century Man”) even as its end is inscribed (“Here lies 21st Century Man”).

Leverage Point: 

The chant-like repetition forces recognition of time’s inevitability while transforming mortality into mythic refrain.

Inputs / Outputs: 

Personal voice + minimal rules of rhythm and repetition → sonic mantra → listener’s awareness of mortality/legacy → projection into mythic imagery (collage)

Effect: 

Oscillation between pride and futility, anthem and elegy, present and future absence

Ethical Valence: 

Reflective—stages human ambition as both hubris (Icarus) and vulnerability (epitaph).

Design Note: 

The pairing of audio mantra with digital myth-image collapses time and story; the work functions as a self-written eulogy for an era still in progress.