The Global Warmning (GW) installation idea will currently comprise of a regional TV news piece, a mini IV/Poetic documentary, blog, website and ephemera from the GW movement. The eventual aim is to put this content on the web and on social media sites and to see if it can have a life of its own outside of the installation too. The objective of the piece is to convince an audience that it is factual, but really only the facts about global warming are the truth. The characters and narrative are fictional composites designed to hook the audience and draw them into the subject matter. However I want the piece working on lots of different levels and I have expanded on these below. The aim is to create discourse form the piece and more importantly the subject matter of global warmning. If you like the installation is a Trojan horse for communicating the facts of the GW issue to the audience that they will take away. Working in education facts can be a bitter pill for students to swallow. However if you dress them up as something else and create stories and entertainment around them they are much more readily consumed. We have been beaten around the head with GW facts, stats and calls to arms for a long time and we are almost apathetic to it. My aim is to dress it up as something else and hopefully educate by character, creativity, narrative and stealth.
The Truth
I want the audience to hopefully address the notion of "the truth" and how it can be false, true and every shade of grey in-between. How important is the truth? Can it educate, entertain and inform? How willing are we to stray from the truth and "not let it get in the way of a good story" as many a tabloid editor is said to have proclaimed. What happens when the audience see through the mask do they feel elated to have solved the puzzle or deflated that they have been misinformed? The truth has been at the centre of all of my work and this is no different. To return to a quote from the Robert Evans biopic The Kid Stays in the Picture “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently”. If the facts are true how much can the characters and narrative be the vessel to carry these to an audience.
Layers
These news piece, a mini IV/Poetic documentary, blog, website and ephemera from the GW movement. will all combine to give the installation a ring of truth. Research is generally based on a minimum of triangulation and cultivation theory is a media theory that the more you are told something the more likely you are to believe it. These are both tricks that I aim to apply in the multi-strand narrative from the elements I create within the installation to try and convince the audience of the truth but constantly re-affirming it with a different piece of evidence.
The Uncanny
However I do not want it to be 100% authentic. I want it to feel 98-99% right but to have a slight unerring quality and sense of the uncanny too. I want there to be an oddness and a not quite right about the piece to make the audience question it and to feel a sense of unease. The balance of this is really tricky but it is something I am striving for. the aim is to make the piece even more interactive to the audience as they try to make sense of why it does not feel quite right. The uncanny is a psychological concept which refers to something that is strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may also describe incidents such as where an everyday object or act is experienced in an unsettling, alienating, or taboo context.
The concept of the uncanny was perhaps first fixed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. where he recognised the uncanny's mixture of the familiar and the eerie confronts the subject with their own unconscious, repressed impulses. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure," resulting in an irreducible anxiety gesturing to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a variety of subsequent thinkers and theorists.
This experience is accompanied by a discomforting effect and often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as in the uncanny valley effect. Examples of this are in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls among others. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the 'valley' has been cited in the popular press in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. This is something I will need to watch in my own work and perhaps flirt with but not cross the line too much.
Puzzles & Enigmas
I want there to be hidden clues within the piece and a sense of being in the know for some of the audience to hopefully make the piece something that is discussed afterwards. The aim is that if they are discussing the piece during their interaction or indeed hopefully afterwards. Is Ben Wright a real character? Was there a Global Warmning movement? Did he really disappear? Is he really back? Was it a government conspiracy?
Also I want to give little clues in the piece for the observant to pick up on and feel a sense of satisfaction by being in on the joke if you like. The surnames of the characters will all be taken from famous hoaxes such as those behind the Alien Autopsy and Cottingley fairies or from of illusionists such as Blaine and Copperifield.
I feel that some audiences derive huge gratification from enigmas, puzzles that need to be solved. It makes the pieces more interactive and engaging as human beings hate loose ends and puzzles left unsolved. One of the things that I want to achieve in the piece is exactly this. I want the elements of the installation as mentioned to be 98-99% right but to leave room for questioning.
Perfection
Life is not perfect, it is full of ideosyncrasies, contradictions, loose ends and peccadillos. Stories do not all happen in 120 minutes of screen-time and there are always threads that cross over as well as inaccuracies. As with the uncanny I do not want everything to be perfect BUT the loose ends and inaccuracies must be small so as to keep up the charade. Minor errors will be fine. As for the TV news piece local news has long been the focus of some ridicule. The ITV local news show in Yorkshire is called Calendar but due to the amount of holes in facts and reporting it acquires the nickname colander. Wikis, blogs and social media are notoriously not always on the money so these allow some scope for this.
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