During my research into sci-fi texts such as 1984 and the Kurt Wimmer film Equilibrium I discovered a coherent theme of propaganda being used to force abstinence and celibacy. In 1984 the youth of Oceania are encouraged to join the Junior Anti-Sex League. The ASL preaches promises of Purity through Chastity and encourage the adoption of Artsem (Artificial Insemination in Newspeak) as a way of reproducing.
In Equilibrium, citizens are often convicted of 'Sense Offences' including lust and passion towards the opposite sex. These offences are usually punished by incineration. Both texts employ chastity as a way of extinguishing the sex drive and destroying the traditional family unit - as this is seen to be deviations to the ideological causes of both institutions in Equilibrium and 1984.
I too decided to adopt this sense of forced chastity in one of my loops. I wanted to portray the dictatorship that technology has over our lives and by using similar propaganda I could draw similarities to the forces in Equilibrium and in 1984. I wanted to further this intertextual referencing by bringing in other recognisable imagery of oppressive regimes in modern society. I selected the Soviet Russian Union and East German Communists. I decide to incorporate Communist typefaces, namely the Kremlin font. I chose the bold and stark colour palettes of strong reds and crisp whites, to resemble the colours of the Russian flag. The character design was inspired by West German graffiti on the Berlin Wall opposing the East German regime. I liked the simplicity of the design of the male, I emulated this using the pen tool and duplicated it to create a 'female' by adding a gradual fade of hair and slightly lighter hue. Using simple animation techniques, such as position keyframing and scaling, I created a scene with objects that I had created in Photoshop.
The message behind my animation was twofold, I wanted to highlight how human interaction with social networking through ever accessible mediums such as smartphones and tablet devices is creating data. Big data that can be commodified and in this way we are producing for a regime of Intelligence, advertising and security services use these data packages to commodify us also. The secondary message of my loop was to highlight the role of technology in a oppressive regime against us as citizens. I feel I have achieved this through the inter textual references that I previously mentioned.
The latest loop I have created was the Nietzsche-inspired God is Code short. Nietzche coined the controversial phrase in his 'Parable of a Madman' poem/writing. He was writing about the decline of modern society and the birth of the postmodern age. here is the extract.
'Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.'
Nietzche isn't just referring to a divinity. He is saying that all the grand narratives of society were crumbling, eroding and changing. Society was becoming secular, losing faith and ignoring the 'gods.' Science can't give us all the answers, religion and politics definitely cannot, so to Nietzsche. God Is Dead.
But now, I challenge that God isn't dead, God is present but in a different form. In today's society there is an omnipotent being. something that creates and kills, something that controls us; from our bank accounts to our global security. God isn't dead, now God is Code.
The loop is very simple in construction - here is a basic storyboard that I started out by creating.
My initial plan was to have some very large, bold lettering on a plain background. I would then distort these and make it look like a corrupt file, citing reference from glitch artists such as Curt Clonginger and Rosa Menkman . This distortion would them be replaced by the secondary phrase 'God Is Code'
The basic idea of the loop was to reference the way technology is being used to replace much of modern day society, not only is Nietzsche replacing God as deceased, now technology is replacing Nietzsche's notion. As now, In Code We Trust.
To create the glitch effect I duplicated the text layer in photoshop twice. I then colour overlaid the layers into a green and pink layer, I used the eyedropper tool to use the same colours as similar glitch art examples and then aligned them to be slightly differently on the horizontal plane. I did the same for the Code layer.
Next I removed and offset random selections of the text to create a fragmented effect, I then saved these to different layers so that I could individually animate them in After Effects. In After Effects I took the layers and animated them to a dispersed position in relatively few frames so that there was a quick glitch sequence, I added stutter to create a lagging effect and then brought the fragments back to the main image again. I repeated the sequence a few times and applied a similar sequence to the Code image. This then completed my loop.
Whilst reading 1984, I knew I wanted to make a comment on the idea of Newspeak. Newspeak is the process of compounding words to create a new semi-language for the nation of Oceania in the Orwellian dystopia. "The destruction of words is a beautiful thing." according to brother Syme who worked on the Newspeak dictionary in the novel. This stuck with me as the destruction, abbreviation and compounding of words is happening in contemporary society due to the role of technology. At the moment. this destruction is minimal and almost solely reserved for comical benign words like "Lol" and "Twerk" ridiculous new words that have made it into the Oxford Dictionary this last year. But I believe that is one of the dangers an always-connected, sped-up, fibre-optic society that already has a dwindling attention span.
This is an extract of an info graphic created by socialtimes.com that demonstrated the loss of attention span. Their studies show that attention span has dropped to just 5 seconds. This can be blamed upon the instant information gratification that social networking and internet searches can provide us, as well as short bursts of dynamic entertainment made possible by the web, Instagram, Youtube and Vines etc.
This loss of attention span could be a reason for the destruction of language and long prose we see today.
It is with a relatively small leap of the imagination that we can see ourselves speaking in a Newspeak-like language, roughly based on english but streamlined and dumbed-down so that only the plainest of utterances required to function in society exist. This is where Big Brother used Newspeak to its greatest 'advantage.' With limited expression, the language became a controllable tool for the totalitarian state to restrict creativity and flair. The language made it impossible to create expressive writings or even thoughts - restricting freedom and individuality.
Now, I must make it clear that I do not believe that words such as "Lol" and "Twerk" will lead us into a totalitarian state, all that I am exercising in this research is the way that language can be affected by technology and what the compounding of phrases into short, meaningless utterances can lead to.
After looking into this concept I knew what I wanted to portray but I wasn't quite sure how to present it. The answer came to me when I was browsing through Stoltze Design's book "1000 Music Graphics."and this poster for Modest Mouse designed by The Decoder Ring.
I enjoyed the simple style and layout of the poster. The silhouette of a young stylised woman reminded me of 1950's advertisements and the empty expression of subdued happiness on her face kind of made her look brainwashed. This combined with the hollow circle in place of a brain made it really seem like her thoughts were being controlled, perfect for a demonstration of Newspeak. I began to formulate an idea by working with the graphic, firstly I created a similar vector shape with the pen tool in Photoshop, making a few changes to the hairstyle so that the shape wasn't directly recognisable with Decoder's version. I then created an ellipse in the place of the 'brain' and my 'girl' shape was complete.
I wanted to make the silhouette more grunge-like so added a natural paper texture that i then applied to the vector through the content-aware fill tool. I turned the texture black and white and reduced the opacity. It was better but still not the desired effect, so I converted the vector to a selection and downloaded multiple grunge textures and applied them to the selection. After a short while of experimenting I was settled on a texture I liked. My initial planning was to create the colours with the intention of reversing them to negative in post production. So I added white overlays to the grunge patterns I had created.
Next was to incorporate the Newspeak element. I knew that I wanted to incorporate text from the book 1984 in this loop as I was particularly inspired by Syme's quote "It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words" I decided to take a passage of the text to use as a background, the legibility of the text wasn't important as the loop's purpose was to highlight the destruction. I chose an eroded typewriter text and laid the passage behind the girl shape. I extended the text box to extend past the canvas, this way i could animate it scrolling up and down behind the subject - I chose the scrolling animation to resemble the computer-like devices that Winston uses in the ministry of truth, where he uses newspeak to alter history and his destructive colleague Syme also works. When laying out the text behind the silhouette I decided there would be visual intrigue if there were two sets of text scrolling in opposite directions, this dual-screen kind of idea was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex Machine concept. This was a memory extender where facts can be recalled, edited and re-archived - I can see similarities in these devices and the devices used by Winston at The Ministry of Truth.
Next was to animate the composition, I added position markers to the text to create a scrolling effect back and forth. I made the keyframes easy ease using the assistant to add a more convincing animation. I added a Newspeak in a 1950's font into the 'brain circle' of the girl. I rotated this around a point found through trial and error that didn't cut out any of the text through out its rotation course.
Next i added curved motion path animations to the Newspeak words that I had selected. I added dithering and buoyancy to create a pleasing motion curve that arced from the characters mouth to rise of the screen, in relation to the scrolling text.
I reverted the animation loop back to negative, it gave off an almost medical aesthetic which i enjoyed as it incorporated the technology of x-rays. I added the film grain and the negativity helped accent the Syme quote on the right hand side. All in all i was happy with the development of this experimental loop, I wasnt a hundred percent sure as to how to convey the message, but throughout trial and error and experimentation I achieved a visually pleasing loop with plenty of subtext and referential grounding.
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