We started out very confused as how we would approach such a broad topic. As suggested by Ross, we took to reading Baratta’s introduction to the Venice Biennale, and what stood out was his reference to the “age of anxiety”, which we thought was a good sub-theme to work with. Initially, we decided that our layout should reflect those adopted in webtoons. When we brainstormed what genres to work under, we thought of sci-fi, apocalyptic, steam punk, fantasy, supernatural, going back in time. We thought about addressing and informing the audience by presenting the creative work from the narrator’s perspective.
While thinking about the concept, we asked ourselves how far into the future we’d reach, and maybe looks into the global future of specific aspect of life, such as how people interact with one another. We thought about movies that would provide influence, including Battleship, War Horse, X-Men: Days of Future Past and Tomorrowland. In our research for artists, we came across Kenji Yanobe’s post-apocalyptic installations that are born from his current vision of the future. His metal suits offer ways in which one would survive his image of the future. Inspired by him, we considered the various futures we could imagine. Extrapolating from now, we imagined a future ravaged by atomic warfare. We researched about atomic bombs and their components, as well as imagined mecha suits, in order to design suits that could withstand the impact of radiation. We also found that in 2014, nine nations - the US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea - possessed 16,300 nuclear weapons. Further research led us towards the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII as well as the Japanese nuclear power plant that broke and leaked radiation into the sea.
From this, we decided to transform the creative work into a survival guide, projecting a possible future to which we’d have the solution to living in. The recurring motif of 3 in our publication reflects its symbolic hold over time: past, present and future, birth, life and death. We created the year 3333, WWIII, 33.33x3% chance three options… Eurasia and our nations of the future were inspired by those in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Conveniently, the second time nuclear weapons were used in warfare were by the US in 1945. They had codenamed the bomb dropped on Nagasaki ‘Fat Man’, so we named our bomb of the future ‘Fat Son’. We separated they key components of the Fat Son into the nuclear core (with Uranium nucleus within), explosive, lead shell, outer shell, electronic trigger and detonator, producing drawings of the bomb. Our two suits to withstand and counter the impact of the Fat Son were named ‘Fat Lady’ and ‘Skinny Lady’.
This publication is designed to engage with the audience in numerous ways. Bringing the concept “All the World's futures”, the document is both informative and entertaining the audience of one of many possibilities the future can bring. The drawings and images used within the document are presented in a webtoon manga style and the art is inspired by popular sci-fi and fantasy material such as the X-men series and Legend of Korra. The idea is that the audience, regardless of age, will be attracted into reading into the information given, and give thought about their futures. Additionally, the pages are marked with a dotted folding line which will allow the document to be folded into a paper airplane. Why a giant paper plane? Let audience think about that. Though one interpretation from our team is: “The let the future ride on the thoughts of today.” After all, our document is all about choice.
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