Dystopia 2027
Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
I developed a campaign and a website, aimed at encouraging the viewer to question the world we live in, where free speech is increasingly being supressed and censorship is becoming more and more prevalent.
A run through of my 4 dimensional world, set in the not too distant future where corporate gain is paramount and the working class individual is left behind. The gap between upper and lower class citizens has been marginalised to the point of no return.
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In a world where our every step, every action and every decision is being monitored either through CCTV or through our phones, laptops, tablets or credit cards; our data is now a more valuable resource than oil. Big tech corporations such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and media outlets have strong financial ties with our governments. Because of this, money has a way of prioritising political direction. Another nuance of these political ties is what the mainstream media recites to its society, the narrative needs to sometimes be questioned as these financial ties are not necessarily healthy for society.
Western governments quietly announced plans for new crackdowns on the freedom to protest. There are plans for sweeping new powers to “tackle non-violent protests that have a significant disruptive effect” that give police the ability to arrest and fine someone for peacefully protesting. This is the greatest form of censorship yet and is the ultimate violation of our freedom of speech. It could be a pivotal point in society where if this gets passed, it is a violation on human rights and could be seen as another form of control enforced by the system on the individual. Censorship, freedom of speech and cancel culture is becoming more and more prevalent in society and because of this, there is an increasing divide between upper and lower class citizens.
I would like to increase the awareness of the above issues and look at the way society is governed. Encouraging individuals to be free thinkers, be open minded and seek all sides of the story. Although we may believe what we are being told, could we ask ourselves why other parties believe the opposite? Look to consume information from as many different sources and angles as possible. If we are only exposed to one viewpoint, then it’s unlikely we will be able to think outside of that limited perspective.
Society as a whole needs to think about the increasing cultural difference between corperate wealth and its lower class citizens. And how censorship of free speech may be a contributing factor to the ever greater divide in civilization. As well as this why is our data a free and accesible commodity for big tech corperations to use for their financial or political gain.
The concept evolved from a painting I created in my Fine Art degree where the topic was Symbolism. The image of the eye was the overall concept representing Big Brother watching over us. Throughout the whole project there is a certain language that brings accross this feeling of a society being contolled and manipulated in a way that suits corperate gain.
I enjoyed the ability to bring my painting to life into a 4 dimensional space and communicate the original paintings message and all of the thoughts behind it into an interactive, informative and thought provocing project.
The campaign took the viewer directly to the website using the QR code. In the world we live in right now where everything we require is only a click of a button away, our needs are met and we receive instant gratification, The QR code has fast become a valuable tool in society for getting information out there. I wanted to show a different form of using the QR code in an ad campaign, bringing it to life and telling its own story.
I developed a guerilla campaign using a series of posters and stickers. This made it possible to bring the campaign to the physical world of our streets, as well as using social media. I created a series of images which evolved over time, bit by bit building more elements into the posters. The story developed to show the evolution and development of the QR code.
Keeping the theme in situ with with the whole project. I showcased the QR code in a grungy dystopian style to intrigue the viewer. It then gets used as a surveillance camera to inform. The camera is then the head of a human like figure sillouetting a background with "when free speech died" written in it. It then opens up to a group of people captivated by the camera, until they have finally beed mind controlled they are now the QR code. The whole campaign being a visual representation of how if we as a society look and listern to something for long enough it becomes gospel. The final image is the title poster and a visual representation for the project as a whole.
