Project:

Entangled Media – Assignment 4, Project

Reflection:

Entangled Media – Assignment 4, Reflection

Our groups creation relates to our collective ideas about entanglement as we chose the topic of real and fake news, and explored it through numerous different branches under the title of You Vs You Online. Our creation used text, pictures and sound as we created a collage of real and fake news posters, along with satirical party music, and I think that the affordances of our chosen format allowed us to explore the concept in a very interesting way, as we were able to juxtapose the two topics side by side and have the audience decide what they found more interesting. This project developed our ideas from assignment three as an interesting lead that arose from our previous project was the idea of real and fake, as we created a Wikipedia page about a fake movie. This progressed into exploring real and fake news, a hot topic at the moment, to great length. I think that our media work was effective in that it was visually engaging and drew me in to inspect it further. I also think that the topics covered on each poster were engaging as well, and they made me actually want to stop and read them. What didn’t work was the fact that we wanted to use the doors as frames for our collages, but the doors had to be partly opened on the night, throwing a spanner in the whole collage idea. I also think that the person cutouts enticing audience members to take photos with the collage, working in practice.

One of the questions that arose from our group that I would be interested in exploring in the future is the whole concept of what is real and what is fake. This concept is something our group delved deep into for this assignment, and especially in these current times, it has become a more relevant topic than ever. From research, I discovered this website which detailed all the biggest fake news stories of 2017, and was able to use it as inspiration for the fake stories I created in our project. I find it interesting that people can be fed fake information and potentially never find out that the information was false, and is a concept I would be interested in exploring further. Another part of this concept that appeals to me is that two different people may view the same thing as true or false. For example, someone may look at InfoWars and see it as all made up stories, whereas other people may go to InfoWars for all their news. I find it fascinating how our preconceived ideas of the world could affect how we perceive new information, and would be fun to investigate in further work. Another question that arose from our group was the ways in which we could entangle the audience into our work and make them feel like they are a part of the work. For our project, we did this by creating a collage of real and fake posters and then cut out the shape of a person for people to stand in and take photos of. Whilst our intention may have failed, I think that the idea of having the person cut out to allow the audience to entangle themselves in our work was very entertaining. I think this concept is something I would be interested in working on in the future, giving the audience a kind of active role in the media work I have created. With things like social media now, the audience is able to have their own voice heard by analysing and reviewing the media they like, which is just one way to entangle the audience with the work. I enjoy these watching these videos are reading these articles online, and so would like to somehow explore that or try to further the audience’s role in future media works. As my end goal is to be a director or writer, these are themes that I would be interested in writing about for potential movies or short films I work on in the future.

From visiting the Eavesdropping exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum, it made me reconsider how to engage someone in our work for the exhibition space. I found some of the interesting aspects of the exhibition to be the use of the space, something I hadn’t truly considered before. At the Eavesdropping exhibition, there was a long corridor that was mainly empty, asking the audience to walk down to the end of the corridor before they could see the next artefact in the exhibition. Something about walking down the long corridor gave me this indescribable feeling that was very effective, and made me reconsider how empty space in an exhibition can be just as important as the actual artefacts put inside it. Our group attempted to recreate this feeling with fewer resources by creating a runway that the audience would walk down to reach our project. Whilst not on such a grand scale, I think that the use of a ‘runway’ gave a similar feeling to the one the Eavesdropping exhibition gave me. Another element of the Eavesdropping exhibition that appealed to me was the use of sound. The first room that the audience walked into played sounds that related to the topic in a large, darkened room. When I first walked into the room, a choir was singing a song in whispers. This was something I had never experienced before and I found the experience to be very interesting that I sat there and just listened to it for minutes. I think the use of something so familiar, such as a choir, and then turning it on its head, by making them whisper the song, made for a very interesting experience that I had to stop and take it all in, which was an interesting way to engage someone into the work. Another thing that surprisingly engaged me was the use of seats. If there was a seat placed there I felt like I had to sit in it to get the full experience of the exhibition, then once I sat down I would sit for a while to fully take in the artefact. I think this was an interesting way to engage the audience as it signalled to me what I should do even if I didn’t know what to do yet. A problem that occurred to me during the exhibition was in the room that played a story of a court hearing. If the audience didn’t arrive at the start of the video, they would feel turned away and want to come back to when the video started. This was a problem as the video went for at least over ten minutes, and I found it annoying as I never got to watch the whole video since I didn’t arrive as it started.

My ideas about entanglement and making ‘entangled media’ have greatly changed over the course of the semester. Initially, I only really thought of entanglement as something like entangled headphones, and couldn’t imagine how my media could be entangled. From the first reading we did, I was extremely confused and unable to wrap my head around the ‘mess’ of the world, however the idea of thinking about an object and all the branches that object has within the world was something that resonated with me and helped me progress into understanding the concept. At the beginning of the semester, I thought of entangled media through pictures and text, and created a magazine. As the semester progressed, I felt I struggled with the entangled concept as my second work featured a magazine and soundscape. A problem I had with this work was that the three different forms I chose – pictures, sound, and text – did not blend or entangle with each other very well. Even though I felt my use of each form was engaging, they did not complement each other to create a single piece very well. I think this concept of blending all the forms together seamlessly was something I struggled with all this semester, as I was too interested with making each form appealing on its own that each form did not work together. I think I overcame this struggle by the end of the semester though. In the last couple of weeks, I begun to look at entangled media differently and consider how every piece of media is entangled in a way. Online articles, and websites such as Wikipedia, blend the use text, pictures, motion graphics, etc to great effect and I had only ever considered them as articles, not forms entangled media. I think that helped me breakthrough and truly understand the entangled media concept, as feature articles are very appealing to me. Another thing that helped reconsider my ideas of entangled media was the Eavesdropping exhibition we visited. I think seeing the exhibition, something we were looking to recreate in the following weeks, helped me cement what entangled media is, as I was able to physically see it working in front of me. With our final project, I once again entangled pictures, text, and sound, and I feel that finally I was able to combine these three elements successfully for the first time, and I think that because our project was presented physically rather than online, helped me to truly understand the entangled media concept.