World Building

ARTIST STATEMENT:
There is nothing more powerful than an idea. Through ideas, wars are started and ended,
diseases are cured, art is created, and love is born. We decided to create a world in which ideas
became commodities, items to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. In doing so, we came
to consider how the world we created, and in turn, the world we live in reflect and influence our
morals and society.
It was an enjoyable experience crafting the world in which ideas were mined, bought, and
sold. What was particularly interesting was that we seemed to feed off of each other’s ideas, even
though we worked mostly separately. Each new idea or concept seemed to spark new ideas and
we were very unified in our vision of this strange world. Upon further reflection, it became clear
that this was due to our having a unifying theme or purpose in our world building. Julian Beecker
wrote in a 2009 essay that fiction follows fact. In our case, the design of our world followed fact
in that it was based on our perceived inequalities in the world and merely accentuated these.
George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, is not merely a novel about one man’s search for sex
and fulfillment in a dystopian society. Rather, it is a stirring commentary on not only the society
in which Orwell lived, but the progress of the human race. In much a similar fashion, we came to
see how our created society was a commentary on our current society and world. There is class
inequality in the world today and although social mobility is possible, it is severely limited due
to lack of education and appropriate infrastructure. In short, the poor get poorer and the rich get
richer, although there are several exceptions. We wished to highlight this, by creating a world in
which there is no social mobility, since even ideas can only be purchased by the rich.
We attempted this feat by creating a newspaper. Through this medium we were able to
present several different ideas in what would hopefully be a fairly normal fashion. We wanted
to present the world as those living in it would see it and not as outsiders. Because of this, we
focused on ordinary stories and advertisements. Through advertisements, we showed fashion, in
particular focusing on the elaborate fashions of the upper class. One of the advertisements even
compares the fashionable upper class to the plain clothing of the lower class. The upper class
show their power and status through their extravagance. We also focused on the idea of ideas
affecting everything from propaganda to crime.
Through this assignment, we were able to not only create a world and society, but also
were able to speak through this world and get a point across that was more powerful through the
presentation.
This project has been a chance to retool the world I inhabit into something a little more grotesque and unseemly. That is the whole point of creativity, isn't it? To see the world through a different lens. Even though we live only once, we have an opportunity through art and film to live different kinds of lives. If we take all that away, we become confined to that one life we were born into and kiss aspiration goodbye. The world we live in isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but through exercises like this we can draw attention to the things that need adjustment as well as inspire gratitude for the things we have.