RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? Footnotes

The initial stage to creating any Animate is to absorb the content thouroughly. The first challenge to making this particular Animate was Evgeny Morozov's thick Belarusian accent. It took me a while to get used to the nuances in the way he spoke English. Thankfully I eventually had some pictures to help me understand!

I have been actively listening to content for long enough now and I am aware there is often a point when I physically feel my ears prick, almost as if there is some kind of tensioning of ear drum and I genuinely feel a physical change when I begin to tune into content. My ears feel tight in their core and I listen hard. Before I pick up a pen or even a pencil. I listen. And then I listen again and then listen again. In fact I listen until the meaning of the presentation gets lost for a short time and then I listen and I find an entry into it again. This is really the process of tuning one's ear to the full meaning of the talk, to let the messages flow, form, divide and reform in different structures all within my minds eye.

 

 

I do a lot of my listening in my car as I drive through the Kent countryside. I drive a Smart car but this really doesn't help with the thinking, it does not make me smart. I play a ten minute audio and then when it's finished I start it again. Pictures form in my mind. I sometimes have to pull over and write a note to myself, which is often incomprehensible when I revisit it as I often have moved on from that particular meaning. I sometimes wonder what I have scrawled and what it relates to. It's a very physical process, driving and listening.

 

 

At first, I do not watch the longer lecture of the talk on the RSA website because I prefer to work from the ten minute audio track on its own. This allows me to really concentrate on the audio and the content. I find watching a talking head is actually more distracting to me when I am trying to probe the content. Also the RSA talks tend to run to 45 minutes or so and there is a lot of information that I don't need to listen to for pure visual translation. It is only after I have the bones of the visual structure I tend to go back and watch the talks for clarity and context.

This talk was the first one where I actually read the book in tandem with the talk.  'The net delusion'. For convenience I downloaded it for the iPad, which I thought rather apt considering the subject matter. It proved to be quite a handy format as I was able to search for references in the application. I still prefer paper books. I like to underline things and scribble in the margins and make doodles. I am sure someone will argue with me that iBooks can make notes but I like the immediacy of drawing on things. Well I would I suppose.

I had it in mind to make an Animate using animals as the characters. I am a big fan of Richard Scarry and love the little worlds that he created and wanted to try something like that.

 

I initially liked the idea of having cute characters living in an adult world. I didn't really have the Morozov piece in mind for this but one thing in the content triggered something that I thought would be interesting to build upon. I remember listening in the car with my ears turned up sharp and 'seeing' a bird table and a cat when he says, 'What we don't realise is that Twitter, despite all its virtues is actually a public platform, and if you do want to plan a revolution on Twitter you're actually visible to everyone'

 

I imagined the bird on a bird-table and a prowling cat to represent Twitter and a tree next to it with the branches acting as a network. This I thought could represent other social media platforms like Facebook.  It was this small scene that led to widening the scope. I had the 'villains' which were cats and the 'victims' which were birds. I thought it would be fun to put a few famous birds up in the branches. For the keenest eyes we have Busby from the British Telecom adverts of the 70s, Tweetie Pie, Woody Woodpecker and Orville. Subsequently Orville gets his head chewed off. How he wished he could fly!

 

The trunk of the tree was a route in which the cats could trace and capture the birds. The birds seemed to only work for the Twitter reference, which was the obvious choice.

The logical step was to use mice. Not only because cats do chase and catch them but they fitted in really well with the technological aspect of being 'computer mice' too. I didn't make that explicit in the drawings. I wanted them to be cute and vulnerable. I also recognise that cats and mice have been used in this capacity and with far better effect by Art Spiegelman and his fantastic Maus graphic novel. I hoped that our piece of work would be reconised as being a small part homage to Mr Spiegelman's masterwork.

When I make Animates I always try to get into the voice of the speaker. I really try and shake off my own particular viewpoint on the content and try and work with translating the meaning as the voice of the speaker. This is an intention and I can see where there might already be challenges to this notion. As I say it is an intention and I can't say if it is successful or not based on the fact that one is already shackled and loaded with a particular way of understanding based on one's own experiences. It is important, I think, to concentrate hard on the audio to ascertain the 'meaning' and not just what is being said.

It was with this notion in mind that I set about trying to go deeper with the content. As I listened to the talk over and over I became increasingly aware that I didn't have a clue what was being meant, the true meaning was slipping away from me. So I went through the talk piece by piece and I made my own research, reading the book, searching for the references Morozov was talking about and also making notes of possible visual frameworks. I think that's all any artist can do at the beginning is to gather the elements they need to make true connections and gain understanding. I made it a mission to understand the content myself before I did anything else.

 

In the opening sequence of the Animate Morozov mentions how the information revolution is transforming countries like China, Iran and the former Soviet Union. I wanted to know what those revolutions looked like. So I did my research. For the former USSR I used the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. In Iran I used images gleaned from the Green Revolution (I laughed about 'Mousavi' being 'Mouse'cular) and from China Morozov mentions the persecution of the practitioners of Falung Gong, to which I have illustrated a mouse hiding behind a computer with a cat trying to claw him.

In the RSA talk, Morozov says, 'the most famous quote was, 'that if social networking and blogging was around in the early '90s the genocide in Rwanda wouldn't have happened.' In my research and from reading the Net Delusion I found out that the quote was from Gordon Brown and decided that it would be better to be accurate. I also like the fact that Gordon Brown could be 'Gordon Brown Mouse'. The UM on the Humvee stands for 'United Mice.'

To illustrate the 'great dissident movements in Poland' I just had to use a reference to Lech Walesa and to render him as a mouse. The cat is wearing a Polish Army uniform from that period.

 

The next reference that I have used is from the film Dr Strangelove. I am a massive Stanley Kubrick fan and I immediately pictured the famous H-Bomb riding scene from the end of the film as Morozov mentions in his talk about the fascinating title for a fictitious Thomas Friedman column. 'Drop iPods not bombs'. We can see a little cartoon of a Friedman mouse in the newspaper, obviously as a mouse.

One of the most fun drawings I made for this piece was the drawing of the authoritarian leaders as cats. From top right and going in a clockwise direction we have Ethiopia's Girma Woldegiorgis talking to Nigeria's Goodluck Jonathan, probably about hats. Below them we have on the left Bahrain's Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa sitting next to Kuwait's Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. To his left going clockwise is Raul Castro from Cuba who is next to King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Crushing the mouse is that saggy old cloth cat Gadaffi of Libya who sits next to the frightening leader of Burma, Thein Sein who looks more like a team America baddie than the real team America baddie sitting next to him licking his paw, North Korea's 'supreme leader' Kim Jong il. The final three cats are the UAE's Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan below Hu of China and finally the King of Jordan, Abdullah II. It was surprisingly easy to render them as cats.