Sanctum Response

Sanctum

When you look up the definition of the word 'sanctum' it reads as one's own personal place of spiritual or confidential safety. One's own sanctuary, a place of retreat. Sanctum shows what that means to people today and how distorted that idea has become.  The true power of this piece is that it utilizes the constant monitoring of a path that hundreds of people go by daily, as well as the display of those people in real time behind the randomized anonymous posting of real people's Facebook statuses. Being a social media site, Facebook is meant for people to connect to their friends and colleagues for various reasons, and like any other site like this, features the ability to post whatever it is that person is thinking at the time. If you only look at the statuses people post, (aside from interesting facts and funny pictures of GIFs), it is apparent that this completely public system of thoughts is most often used for rants or exclamations of how positive or, more noticeably, negative said person's life is at the time they hit post. This creates a response inside of anyone who reads that status and it is correlated with the reader's perception of said person. The point of calling the piece "Sanctum" is to show how odd it is that people will display to any one of their 500+ Facebook friends that they are struggling in their life, most often in some sort of personal matter that they wouldn't actually speak to most of these 'friends' about. Yet somehow the number of "Likes" or "Comments" in a way validate to the poster that their claim is legitimate. Having the posts that appear in Sanctum be anonymous takes away the association to the name behind them, and instead makes these random thoughts, good or bad, that most people can relate to in some way, into an entirely new entity. Showing the many thoughts of this nameless entity of Facebook over the footage of far too many passing faces to recognize and correlate, proves how each person in this world has struggles of their own, each one important to themselves. Sanctum shows how Facebook, and all other social media sites, while in a way showcase the insecurity of those posting their personal thoughts about life, could make for a more cohesive and understanding society in this modern age of networking, were these points of empathizing not limited to those on one's list of "friends".