GW: HOAXES AND CREATED STORIES

The aim of my Global Warmning piece is to try and sell a falsehood to an audience. The aim is not to create a hoax but to use a dramatic, intriguing and interesting fictionalised narrative that can be used to help and sell the message I want to convey warning us of the Global warming issue. I have found that the Global warming issue is a little flat and a hard sell to audiences to get them to understand and act upon. This is because it does not seem urgent, it has become stale and it has been miss-sold for so long with spin by parties with self serving interests. I aim to try and make it more interesting by dressing up real facts in af ake or fictionalised narrative of a movement and characters that never existed. This will hopefully gain interest from the general publcicand get the issue talked about.

I have been researching lots of hoaxes to find out what it is that makes them work and tricks that they used to pull them off. I want to try and do this with my piece be it online OR as an installation. My current aim is for it to live online and be a variety of content linked together on the web that individually gives clues but all together pieces together the whole story.

I like the idea of these running through my own work somehow as little clues as to the true nature of the work that I am creating. Perhaps using images of them or the names of those perpetrating the hoaxes feeding back into my work as clues as to what is REALLY going on in the piece.

There is a huge variety here including the following.

• Cottingley Fairies 1917. Girls fake photos of fairies at the bottom of garden.
• Piltdown man 1912: Fragments of faked skull and jaw of HUGE man. Actually orangutan.
• The turk 1717: fake chess playing machine really a man iside.
• Alien Autopsy 1995: Two men fake alien autopsy footage.
• BBC Spaghetti trees 1957. April Fools day BBC joke with created spaghetti trees.
• Fiji Mermaid 1842: A mummified body that was actually grafted fish tail and baby monkey.
• Cardiff giant 1869: Giant man actually a model.
• BBC's Ghostwatch 1992: Spoof ghostly live show screened on Halloween.

The issue I will have is that most of these were in the days before the internet so I will have to be extra careful. My feeling is that one source will simply not sell my hoax and that I will need lots of threads to do this. This could be web-sites, mentions in Wikipedia, video, photos, filmed scenes and interviews and blogs etc. These will all be interlinked and provide a multi-thread approach to trying to convince the audience. On their own they will be a tough sell but if they all solidify one another the audience are more likely to be convinced by multiple sources all saying the same thing.

http://cassieshouseofhorror.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/what-is-slender-man.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8679113/Five-famous-hoaxes-which-fooled-the-world.html

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/famous-hoaxes-fake-images

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15012-eleven-of-the-greatest-scientific-hoaxes/

http://listverse.com/2007/08/30/top-10-famous-hoaxes/