(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGfN6ty0JkU)
In a world where we’re dominated by our phones and technology we were interested in how much media, in particular social media, influences our lives. It has gotten to the point where trivial things, such as Kylie Jenner’s hair colour or the premiere of a new movie have become more important in a sense, or more wide spread than actual important issues. We have become more infatuated and more involved with the lives of celebrities than our own lives.
We wanted to portray this in a way that contrasted the failure of the media’s role to report important events that affect society as a whole, to how the media is now dominated with insignificant events of little sustenance. We feel like there needs to be some sort of rebellion against this superficiality, so we started thinking about Hacking and the vigilante agenda. The meaning behind hacking can be seen in the actual act of hacking itself before anything is even spoken or represented. We then turned our work into a rebellion of the failure of the media, by copying what they do best, and reporting on these insignificant issues of little sustenance in the guise of a hacker.
Our work has been influenced by both Soda_Jerk’s work (Week 5: Documentation/Editing) an !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s Surveillance Camera (Week 7: Perception).
We took the idea of editing from Soda_Jerk by mashing up different footage to create a new meaning and idea, and the idea of hacking surveillance from Bitnik’s work. Together with the integration of other weekly topics such as erasure, perception, vagueness, failure, and repetition.
Using influences from the works above and ideas we’ve discussed in class we’ve found a news clip that had technical difficulties and played off that. Using editing techniques to further distort the clip as well as adding in a segment of an anonymous hacker. We recorded a voice over talking about issues that were at the top of the Facebook ‘trending’ segment that week, and distorted the voice to fit the ‘hacker’ aesthetic. We’ve set up our work to mimic a news report in order to portray a satirical parody the original use of the daily news report.
