the future is confusing.
With a wide raging scope to design and produce a creative piece that responds to digital aesthetics, I decided to produce a video that is formulated from other, pre-existing, videos. I chose to produce this 'supercut' style of video because of its ability to not only easily reference recognisable cultural artifacts but also use these to subvert the original intended narrative by placing it amongst other cultural artifacts in various media formats.
RATIONALE:
I rejected the option of producing a written creative piece as I feel this would limit my ability to articulate the impact of the constant visual assaults that impact the way we navigate information and receive media (social and otherwise). As such, I decided that I would use the ‘supercut’ style of video which is both indicative of the way we access narratives in digital era and is also a format which can incorporate the many varied narrative elements. Within this, I decided to incorporate a range of image types including, news footage, gifs, images and sound to reflect/create a portrait of chaos that still manages to establish an overarching narrative. In choosing these images, I wanted to first (and prominently) feature the hopeful images that permeated the beginning of the domestic digital era to highlight to what extent this seems timeworn and innocuous compared to the way in which we use (and recieve) media today. The images featured later in the video were used in order to counter this by showing the expunction of that naive hope - actually what now governs the digital image is human crises, meaningless advertising, incessant theorising of horrific events and endless depictions of anticipated (to varying extents) future atrocities. I juxtaposed the fast-paced influx of media imagery within this creative piece with a slow-paced reading by Tom O’Bedlam of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) which, I believe, works to seperate both audio and visual as distinct but affecting elements of the entire piece. I used this modernist poem to make relevant the anxiety and terror that blanketed the inter-war period in which the poem was written with the hope that it could go some way to illustrate the anxiety that blankets the so-called diital-era. The poem, in my opinion (and I forgo any spiritual or religious interpretation), illustrates the decline of society and the crises that face men when faced with a hopeless/meaningless landscape. Specifically, in our digital era, we are both the “stuffed men” and “the hollow men”, in this I suggest that we have access to endless sources of information and visual stimulation but, yet, we remain hollow because we cannot make sense of that which fills us – the fear is not of a dystopic future but that we are too busy processing and consuming that we cannot achieve even a semi-utopia. This is how I interpret the poem and have used it with corresponding images which will, hopefully, convey that anxiety. My own personal interest in the modernist period is founded in the specific time between the world wars and, in using this, it was my intention to display that same existential dread of the modernist era that lies beneath and beyond the hope of our digital era. Despite this, I wanted the outcome not to be a depressing display of horrific images, but more towards reflecting on past atrocities to move forward, learn and change.
I rejected the option of producing a written creative piece as I feel this would limit my ability to articulate the impact of the constant visual assaults that impact the way we navigate information and receive media (social and otherwise). As such, I decided that I would use the ‘supercut’ style of video which is both indicative of the way we access narratives in digital era and is also a format which can incorporate the many varied narrative elements. Within this, I decided to incorporate a range of image types including, news footage, gifs, images and sound to reflect/create a portrait of chaos that still manages to establish an overarching narrative. In choosing these images, I wanted to first (and prominently) feature the hopeful images that permeated the beginning of the domestic digital era to highlight to what extent this seems timeworn and innocuous compared to the way in which we use (and recieve) media today. The images featured later in the video were used in order to counter this by showing the expunction of that naive hope - actually what now governs the digital image is human crises, meaningless advertising, incessant theorising of horrific events and endless depictions of anticipated (to varying extents) future atrocities. I juxtaposed the fast-paced influx of media imagery within this creative piece with a slow-paced reading by Tom O’Bedlam of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) which, I believe, works to seperate both audio and visual as distinct but affecting elements of the entire piece. I used this modernist poem to make relevant the anxiety and terror that blanketed the inter-war period in which the poem was written with the hope that it could go some way to illustrate the anxiety that blankets the so-called diital-era. The poem, in my opinion (and I forgo any spiritual or religious interpretation), illustrates the decline of society and the crises that face men when faced with a hopeless/meaningless landscape. Specifically, in our digital era, we are both the “stuffed men” and “the hollow men”, in this I suggest that we have access to endless sources of information and visual stimulation but, yet, we remain hollow because we cannot make sense of that which fills us – the fear is not of a dystopic future but that we are too busy processing and consuming that we cannot achieve even a semi-utopia. This is how I interpret the poem and have used it with corresponding images which will, hopefully, convey that anxiety. My own personal interest in the modernist period is founded in the specific time between the world wars and, in using this, it was my intention to display that same existential dread of the modernist era that lies beneath and beyond the hope of our digital era. Despite this, I wanted the outcome not to be a depressing display of horrific images, but more towards reflecting on past atrocities to move forward, learn and change.
INFLUENCE:
I have taken influence from the ‘supercut’ documentary film genre that has gained popularity and is largely influenced by the unique direction style of Adam Curtis. Curtis, interestingly, has access to vast amounts of media as a BBC archive and curates them to make socio-political documentaries. For other directors or those interested in curating footage to create a narrative, there is a vast amount of footage and clips available on the web to aid such a project. Due to the popularity of video sharing platforms like YouTube, anyone can curate and produce a narrative and share it with the world. Though this is usually done at amateur level, is it that which usually makes a piece unique. The supercut video does not contain text and therefore impacts at a visual level and therefore invites the viewer to give the narrative their full attention, or that is the intention of the curator of such a piece. I took influence also from 'remix' culture which removes the context and remediates a clip/sound to subvert (to varying degrees) the initial intention of the media clip.
I have taken influence from the ‘supercut’ documentary film genre that has gained popularity and is largely influenced by the unique direction style of Adam Curtis. Curtis, interestingly, has access to vast amounts of media as a BBC archive and curates them to make socio-political documentaries. For other directors or those interested in curating footage to create a narrative, there is a vast amount of footage and clips available on the web to aid such a project. Due to the popularity of video sharing platforms like YouTube, anyone can curate and produce a narrative and share it with the world. Though this is usually done at amateur level, is it that which usually makes a piece unique. The supercut video does not contain text and therefore impacts at a visual level and therefore invites the viewer to give the narrative their full attention, or that is the intention of the curator of such a piece. I took influence also from 'remix' culture which removes the context and remediates a clip/sound to subvert (to varying degrees) the initial intention of the media clip.