Newspeak Loop // Decoder Ring - Modest Mouse Poster

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.