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Assessment 3 final work: the premiere screening of the new short film ‘The Space Annihilation Race: The Might of America’.

Group: Christopher Chen, Jacky Wang, Maddie Locke, Felix Partos, Zhiyuan Jiang (Sue)

Topic: Context and time

For our project, we decided to re-interpret an historical event and put it into a modern day context. We chose the space race between America and Russia, and brought it into 2019, re-imagining it as a struggle between America and North Korea to be the first to destroy an alien fleet. We then needed an event to base our presentation around. We wanted to explore the idea of events being viewed and portrayed differently by opposing sides and from different contexts, so our final idea was to create a short film and hold a premiere screening event for it.

Our event takes place in America, an unknown number of years in the future. The scripts for the video, and the preshow and aftershow talks, were written to be clearly biased towards America, and the video paints North Korea as inferior.

We also aimed to take advantage of the hype and atmosphere of a premiere screening to emphasis the sense of patriotism. This hype is contrasted with the purposefully low quality video (rough animation and lack of voice acting), which was referenced a couple of times in the script.

At the end of the presentation, protesters come into the room and tear down the posters, shouting “Don’t believe their lies!” etc. This offers some insight into how the event was viewed by different groups.

We took inspiration from several pieces of art and media while brainstorming and writing our project, including:

History Oversimplified (inspiration for the style of animated historical video)  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzALIXcY4pg

Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (the video's satirical portrayal of the effects of politics on media) - https://www.scribd.com/doc/59218957/Wag-the-Dog-Analysis

https://freesound.org/people/RoganDerrick/sounds/260434/Can creative acts be rebellious when rebellion has become canonised in art, design and media histories? What would a contemporary creative rebellion look like?

My feelings about this question is that being “rebellious” has indeed lost its full meaning in many ways, due to the volume of such works being created. With the world more connected than ever before, there are endless things to fight and speak out against. With this knowledge, my conclusion from assessment 1 was that the most important aspect of rebellion is the individual drive to create positive change.

When most people see a rebellious creative work, they acknowledge it and its message, and then will have forgotten about it a week later. My work tries to convey the idea that a personal drive is often required to truly take action, not just the words and pictures of a stranger that you see repeated countless times. This was the main message behind my work for assessment 1: stop simply appreciating all of these rebellious works, actually do something that you want to do!

For a long time I wasn’t sure where to take my ideas, or even what kind of experiments I could do with the resources at hand. After playing with and thinking about my poster from assessment 1, however, I was able to solidify my central ideas and look for directions to head in.

It was the article by Kristen Kalp that finally made sense of my thoughts, with the message that living a healthy, happy life is the best way to rebel in the modern day. The truth of this varies from one perspective to another but it at least offered some coherence to my jumbled mind. My conclusion was that the individual aspect of changing the way you live to release yourself from any pressures or constraints you may have, and to become happier in your everyday life, is one of the most important things to consider about rebellion. While it was more or less just an extension of my earlier work, I wasn’t able to properly formulate this as a concept until this point.

For my final work, I settled on creating an animation as I felt it would offer the greatest freedom for me to shape the work into what I wanted it to be and represent. From there the process was quite straight forward; many hours of drawing and editing in Photoshop and Premiere, as well as sound work done in Ableton Live. It was my first time really using Photoshop to create an animation from scratch; I even had to do some video editing within Photoshop when Premiere wouldn’t work properly. So it was fun learning some new techniques and figuring out solutions to various problems.

The video questions the meaning of rebellion itself, by making it seem as though “anti-rebellion” is the better option. However, the “anti-rebellion” is the true rebellion, in the midst of a myriad of countless ads and posters that label themselves as rebellious. The anti-rebellion headphones allow the character(s) in the video to take a look at their own life, free from the words of others, and decide what they want to change about their situation. This is the essence of rebellion; fighting against oppression to create positive change. This is what really happens to the character(s) using the headphones; they refuse to accept the ‘norm’ (in this case, the norm is rebellion in all facets of life) and in doing so, better their situation. So by refusing rebellion, they are inf act rebelling more than anyone else. I think that this contrast does a good job of encapsulating the main ideas behind my work.

Overall I am very happy with my final work. Not only do I like it due to the fact that it’s a hand-drawn animation, but I think I successfully managed to convey the main ideas behind it. Given more time, I believe I could have added more to make the message clearer, but I am proud of my work nonetheless.

Kalp, K. ‘50 everyday acts of rebellion.’, Kristen Kalp. https://kristenkalp.com/rebellion/

Sounds taken from:

https://freesound.org/people/RoganDerrick/sounds/260434/

FINAL WORK

The video is split into 2 halves. The first half is quite fast and silly; the main character, along with most of society, is obsessed with “rebelling”, although what they are rebelling against seems unclear even to the people themselves. I tried to convey this through the lack of emotion in the facial expressions, and the timing of the animation (pauses in motion representing hesitation etc). The rebellious acts also seem quite silly, the key example being the main character eating the breakfast food raw, causing them to throw up every morning.

The second half begins when the main character receives a gift from a stranger: Anti-Rebellion Headphones. With the constant oversaturation of rebellious messages shut out, the main character’s life becomes calm and pleasant. They even go to work! The Anti-Rebellion Headphones are a play on the true meaning and value of rebellion, and connects back to the core idea of my earlier work, the idea of individual struggle and rebellion. Although they are labelled “anti-rebellion”, what the headphones really do is spark an individual rebellion and gives the person the opportunity to look at their life and decide for themselves what they want to change. In this case, it is represented through the quality of life improvement and increased happiness.

The sounds and music were mostly done by me. I used the alarm beeping and the glass breaking sound from: [alarm] https://freesound.org/people/zanox/sounds/233645/ [glass] https://freesound.org/people/RoganDerrick/sounds/260434/

Some initial planning for the video. It’s going to play with the idea of rebellion and non-rebellion.

These are some snippets of an article by author and poet Kristen Kalp, titled “50 everyday acts of rebellion.” I find the message of the article interesting: that simply living your best life is an act of rebellion in itself, which seems quite relevant in the modern day with global problems and general negativity being so widespread, not to mention everyday obstacles.

In class in week 1, my group made a small poster in response to the question: Can creative acts be rebellious when rebellion has become canonised in art, design and media histories? What would a contemporary creative rebellion look like? I found the concepts that we discussed interesting, so it seemed natural to explore them further for my assessment task.

Creative works in the modern day can seem oversaturated with rebellion that it becomes meaningless – the core idea of our week 1 work. I started to think about how a work *could* be made to be truly rebellious. I brainstormed and made a mind map of the key ideas of what rebellion means. Already an idea was forming: the foundation of rebellion is inspiring action in the people who feel oppressed in some way. However, no clear cause for a possible contemporary rebellious movement was obvious at this point.

My research included a look into prominent rebellious artists of today, such as Banksy, Paul McArthy, Ai Weiwei… all of them creating works with social and/or political commentary. Then there are young artists such as Simon Denny and Yuri Pattison, working with both the physical and digital worlds to create unique works exploring the relationship between our lives, technology, and the corporate world.

All of them relevant, and all of them effective – but I still couldn’t find a cause to centre my own work around.

After some more thinking, I had it: I didn’t need a specific cause.

Which brings me to my poster, one designed to invite and challenge viewers on an individual level. The various elements are put together for a single purpose: not to convince viewers to take a certain side or point of view, but to cause each viewer to think about their personal oppressions, and to inspire them to take action.

Boiling down rebellion into its most basic aspect – that is the essence of this work.

The Art of Rebellion in the 21st Century, Benjamin Fishel, December 14 2015, https://www.thisismorpheus.com/2015/12/the-art-of-rebellion-in-the-21st-century/

An intriguing scrutiny of rebellion in today's art - Revolt and Revolutions, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, review, Mark Hudson, January 8 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/revolt-revolutions-yorkshire-sculpture-park-review/

The Most Influential Artists of the Last Decade, Hana Cohn, Dale Eisinger, August 7 2013, https://www.complex.com/style/2013/08/influential-contemporary-artists/

THE FINISHED POSTER

With the final poster, the face is on a separate back page, visible through a tear in the front page. The text “get me outta here” is implying that the person is somehow trapped and in need of the viewer’s aid. The message of the poster is that it’s all well and good to create and consume rebellious works such as this, but for any change to come about, the viewer must take action themselves. Although no specific cause is put forward here, conveying the message by itself allows it to become more powerful on an individual level as the man’s troubled face becomes a substitute for any personal feelings of oppression or restriction that one might have.

I ended up using one of the more minimalist faces, rather than the original version; not only do I prefer the look of it, but it makes it easier to view the face as simply a vessel for a certain idea, rather than a trapped man.

The text and the scrap pieces are in a desaturated red and heavy black, reminiscent of classic resistance posters. These colours help grab the attention, and also instilling a sense of such posters. They’re stuck on to a plain white page, and it looks almost like the red and black poster(s) has been ripped away to reveal the plainness underneath. This is a comment on the meaninglessness of much rebellious work in the contemporary age.

I have a draft version of my final poster design. With this design I’m trying to send a direct message to the viewer and inspire a personal reaction. I decided that the most important aspect of rebellion is constructing these personal connections between the people and the cause, whatever it may be. While this poster doesn’t convey any specific cause, it sends a message that can be individualised from person to person.

Rebellion against what? Or who? And in what way?

In this modern day, there seem to be people rebelling against nearly everything you can think of. So what form would a major creative rebellion take? There are so many ways of thinking about this concept, but I find myself returning to the key ideas from the initial mindmap; feeling that the main purpose of rebellious works is what matters most.

I found this interesting article from the Guardian about the apparent lack of revolutionary modern artists.

At first glance it seems as though this generation has no major rebellious movement driving its artists, but upon closer inspection this is not the case. We’re living in a world of “hypercapitalism”; technology has led to our lives being constantly invaded by corporations more than ever. “Even the words that were once used to signify creative rebellion – DIY, pop-up, grassroots, punk – have been co-opted, fetishised, used to sell coffee, flog old furniture and entice property buyers to up-and-coming areas.”

The artists of the modern generation are using all the mediums available, both physical and digital, in conjunction with one another to create works that “reappropriate and even hijack the corporate, tech and art worlds from the inside out.”

“This generation of artists are much more interested in investigating the textures and fabrics of the system we are actually under, rather than presenting nostalgic alternatives that are outdated or unrealistic. It is about occupying the worlds of technology and the corporate world, getting close to them and their people.” - Simon Denny, artist

(image: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Simon Denny. Photo: Pablo Enriquez)

So it seems like there is a creative rebellion in the works, just slightly more subtle than one would imagine. An interesting thing to think about in any case.