In this painting, Bosch depicts a version of civilization that exists before Eve eats the apple– before people gain consciousness and morals. With the absence of laws (moral obligations, or concrete restrictions), he makes the viewer question if sin can exist.
The notion of boundlessness in Bosch’s painting is echoed in the limitless nature of social media and technology today. Without any guidelines on what information people have access to or what is posted online, people are enabled to be pulled away from the natural world and reality as they reach a level of enlightenment that humans are not meant to achieve. Hannah Arendt expands on the dangers of this boundlessness when she says, “a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial’, toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature” (2). Since our current technology gives us the power to do anything, how will we decide what we should and should not do? How will we avoid only inventing new technologies for science’s sake, instead of for human’s sake, or the Earth’s sake?
   In my collage, I include Jesus from Caravaggio’s painting, Supper at Emmaus, which illustrates the moment in which the Apostles realize that the man they are sitting with is Jesus resurrected. I depict Jesus acting like the other common people in the painting reaching for an apple on the tree, to symbolize how with access to limitless information in the media and technology people are attempting to equate themselves with Jesus– they desire an inhuman and boundless allotment of information to make themselves all-knowing and powerful– which is only bringing them farther from genuine real life experiences and reality. Building on Adrendt’s point in the context of the painting, if these humans are given no limits they will be free to consume as much fruit as they please solely for the purpose of fulfilling their desires, not because they are hungry. I then include the mirror from Death and the Maiden which illustrates a woman looking into a mirror being held by a figure of Death himself, suggesting that the reflection of herself that she is seeing is Death. In replacing the berry that the man holds with this mirror, I am offering that if we continue on the path of having limitless access to information and content we are on the path toward killing the part of ourselves that remains connected with the Earth and reality. Lastly, I include Adam from Michaelangelo’s painting, The Creation of Adam. In one interpretation of the full painting, Adam is said to be reaching toward what represents the emotional side of the human brain, communicating Michaelangelo’s message that humans have the power to maximize their human  potential through artistic expression. As I place Adam in my collage reaching toward the mirror symbolizing death, I suggest that if people continue to manifest their quest to maximize their human potential through technology without limitations, they are on a path that inches them closer to the death of their understanding of what is real.