The Main Mission:
Electioneering
Here you can see the final version of our project: Electioneering
The main theme of our installation and the theme we extracted from the photo "A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew" is ignorance. During the experience you are wearing headphones with playful music that makes you want to dance, while also hearing an affirming voice telling you how good you're doing and how proud people must be of you and your actions. While this is happening a speaker is playing uneasy music with an aggressive voice telling you to stop, saying how you are making things worse, asking why you aren't listening and telling you that there is something horribly wrong with you. Ultimately you keep walking the path of destruction until the earth reaches its breaking point and explodes, leaving nothing behind.
Artist Statement
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
Ignorance is defined as the lack of knowledge, understanding or information about
something. Inspired by the photo “A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew” this installation
aims to address the growing indifference of the powerful and wealthy towards the climate
crisis and its global impact on regions around the world.
The installation critiques the Ignorance of the 1%, who prioritize their wealth and political
agendas while disasters and quality of life deteriorates worldwide. Through references to
figures like Trump, idiotic government spending and Elon Musk’s increasing influence on
modern politics the art piece exposes how these individuals treat this crisis like a game that
can be controlled with no consequence.
The installation aims to provoke reflection on the collective responsibility of humans to act.
The climate crisis requires global cooperation, not just a few. This artwork calls viewers to
reconsider choices made by those in power and to recognize that their greed and ignorance
cannot be tolerated. We must act.
Master Files:
The master files can be downloaded from this ZIP Folder, they consist of:
- Tutorial Loop
- Audio Headphones
- Main Video (with speaker audio)
(Click to download)
The Process
We started by picking a photo from the World Press Photo 2024 submissions, there were a few that stood out to us, but ultimately we ended up choosing "A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew" by Charles-Frédérick Ouellet.
From this we went and wrote down the most important themes that stood out to us from the visuals of the photo alone, it was important that we did not take into account the added context of the situation and explanation on the World Press Photo website.
We extracted three themes from the photo, Isolation, Consequences and Ignorance.
The story behind this photo is that the man depicted in the center is a member of a fire brigade from Quebec, Canada. He is standing on a high point to scan for any other members of the fire crew, scanning for them so they can mark the area as controlled after a big wildfire incident.
We started by making a mindmap and writing things that came to mind with each topic. Things that stood out were rich/poor, things that can only be seen once and effects on the planet.
In the back of my head I was already thinking about how things would look as an installation, the concept of only being able to experience something once (related to irreversible consequence) intrigued me a lot.
From that thought we came up with the idea of displaying a form of ignorance by forcing the user of our installation to be ignorant. This is where the concept of using headphones to put the user into their own bubble, while also having a speaker on the outside that is conveying a different message.
We stuck with the idea of rich/poor as well, so for our first iteration we used Donald Trump as an example. The way he speaks about himself and the state of the world very much resonated with us and our theme of ignorance.
Some of the feedback we got from Stef was:
- Provocation is interesting
- You can go two routes, show that we can fight back and win, or show the destruction of our world
- The choice of being ignorant is an interesting topic
We used these points later in our creative process to refine our concept and installation.
Based on our chosen photo, I did some sketching while thinking about how things could look as an installation in the back of my head.
One of the ideas was to have the user follow footsteps that kept getting bigger and kept leading you towards destruction, since they are recognizable footsteps the user would be inclined to follow their path. This way we could trick them into walking this path of destruction and invoke a sense of ignorance and guilt. Another subtle hint in the way this was visualized is that the footprints get bigger and bigger to resemble a persons carbon footprint, leaning into the climate related issues in the world, which ties back to the forest fire theme from our chosen picture.
We turned this idea into a prototype which can be seen here:
From the feedback we got from this experiment it was clear that our message wasn't getting across, we needed to make adjustments there.
Ideas that came from this were using soundscapes to convey our message a little more literally instead of just using colors. Also leaving behind a trail of destruction was something that we heard a few times so that is something we wanted to add as well.
We also got the feedback and idea to add a short 'tutorial' so people would know what to do, we noticed that some people just stood still and watched while what we wanted them to do is follow the footsteps along, so in future versions we are going to add a short intro that only continues once the user has actually followed the footsteps.
One of the sources I looked into was this video from Philosophy Tube, they talk about a lot of theory behind ignorance, morals and philosophy.
"Ignorance is not a motionless state. It is an active accomplishment requiring ever-vigilant understanding of what not to know."
- Matthias Gross & Linsey McGoey
One of the most interesting takeaways from this is the difference between passive & active Ignorance, not knowing something because it doesn't concern or interest you or deliberately choosing not to know something for your own gain.
During the first half of the Minor AVD, we did weekly experiments, also based around a World Press Photo. In this case it was the photo "Signal from Djibouti". I included this experiment in my portfolio because I think it shares a lot of resemblance with our main mission, even though I wasn't aware of this at the time.
The premise of this installation was that we needed four people to stand on the colored spots, together they would power the prism in the middle and bring back the light to the world. We combined this with a narrative element by having a voice over tell the story of an evil wizard who stole the light.
There are some overlapping elements here with our main mission project, for example,
In this experiment we tried to use two projectors because we quickly realized that using only one would cause issues with shadows and projecting far away from the projector itself. I also got more familiar with Madmapper and configuring different scenes to play sequentially when people stepped on the circles. I applied the same principals later in the main mission as well. The use of a voiceover was also a good insight, in the experiment in the first few weeks we used a computer generated voice, I found this to be quite bland and not have much impact on the listener, for our main mission we opted to use our own voices which I altered using audio effects and panning.
Calum and I discussed the use of abstract images as inspiration for our visual style, Calum used some of these and incorporated them into the visuals by blending together colors. I made this moodboard myself to get an idea of the type of abstract destruction we want to aim for with our visuals.
Visual Style: Abstract shapes and colors to portray destruction
Pro: Audience gets freedom to experience an abstract thing in their own way.
Con: You start to lose meaning and have to explain stuff. There is no narrative that can be extracted.
Stef came back for a second round of feedback and we got some valuable insights this time. Since the last time he saw our project we are now projecting on the floor (we tried to use two projectors in this version), we added more upbeat music in the headphones instead of the classical music we had before, there is an aggressive voiceover on the speaker outside, and the colors have transformed into more abstract shapes and colors.
This week Stef would give us a green, orange or red light, to let us know how solid our concept was. We ended up getting a green light with some orange spots, which was a surprise for us, but a welcome one.
We learned some valuable stuff this week, we used two projectors to try and get a bigger area on the floor, ideally we wanted it to be as big as possible but this proved to be very difficult and quite a hassle to set up. We tried it again the week after but without success. We had to pivot and start to use a wide lens projector combined with a mirror so we could project directly downwards to have the least amount of shadow since we didn't want the user to cover the visuals.
Stef also told us that he missed a beginning and an end to our installation, there was no real arch. He also told us to enlarge the 'dance floor' he called it a dance floor because the music in the headphones instinctively made him dance around, we found this idea so interesting that we also looked into mimicking dance patterns with the footsteps. He also told us to think about changing the voicelines in the headphones to copy the ones from the speaker, but say them in a nicer tone.
During the last week before the expo, we made some final adjustments, based of the feedback we received I changed the audio of both the headphones and the speakers to align more with each other, I deliberately made the headphone audio dip down in volume and pitch in some moments so the user has the opportunity to hear a glimpse of what is happening on the outside. I also added voicelines telling you to take off the headphones starting subtle but growing in size and numbers overwhelming the listener. This was an interesting experiment but in the end we didn't end up using it because it was too distracting.
We added some trails of destruction to both the audio and video by showing cracks that stayed on the screen as permanent damage, over time more and more cracks stayed on the screen covering everything.
We changed the last visuals of the installation and added a quote at the end to try and have a conclusive ending, we asked for some feedback and heard that the visuals did not align with our other visuals, it felt too different and contrasting, so we would need to simplify it for our final version. We also were told that the quote distracted from the experience as well, and that it was not needed on the projection. We chose to add it to the artist statement instead.
The final visuals were changed into a more abstract depiction of the earth that would shrink, and then explode into supernova-like particles, an inspiration for this was one of my favorite games of all time, Outer Wilds.
The last things we changed was the voice over lines in the headphones, we made them appear less often and we changed the wording a bit to make it feel like it was more of an internal thought rather than someone talking to you. We also changed our 'tutorial' to make it more clear to put on the headphones and stand on the footsteps. We re-used the Styrofoam mannequin head that we used at the very start, and put it on an orange light to create a nice effect since the head was a little see through. This would guide the user towards the headphones and signal that they have to put them on.