RATIONALE / CONCEPT - DIGITAL MONSTER?

Just because something is powerful, should it be feared and considered evil? I believe it’s how we as humans use and manipulate it that matters...
The subject of power that I’m looking at is to do with the Internet. The Internet offers endless amounts of possibilities, as nowadays technology is accelerating and growing at a high rate, which is making anything seem possible. This can excite both euphoria and fear.

I’ve decided to make a sound piece to portray the internet as something powerful, capable of mass destruction that has been dormant but is awakening. As what the internet offers, is an amalgamation of ideas and machines from past centuries. Now our technology is able to conceive such ideas, as previous technologies weren’t advanced enough. The piece shows this internet beast creating fear and terrorising civilization.

I’m almost creating an auditory movie, in terms of story and it sounding like a film soundtrack. I Hope that the sound is enough to tell the story, rather than using moving image. Using just sound, and doing it well, will enable the audience to imagine it themselves and allows the mind to be creative. Just as Cloverfield included no background story in the film, but through random websites, cryptic clues and possibilities of the story are there to be explored, enabling viewers to come up with our own theories and ideas.

My piece is mimicking and amalgamating the stories of H.P Lovecraft’s novel ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ Godzilla, and the Cloverfield monster. The internet is being portrayed as this monstrous digital creature, awakening at the depths of the earth to unleash itself on the world. All these creatures from films such as Godzilla and Frankenstein, are all metaphorically and realistically representing our cultures anxiety’s and fears form certain periods of time. Examples include, Clovefield- messing with nature or disrupting our planet, Godzilla- the greed of people and the threat of the A-Bomb, Frankenstein- Tampering with life. They all follow this idea of mans creation becoming more powerful than us, and wiping us out.

My monster will be representing our modern day fear and paranoia of the Internet. As without knowing it we are open to identity fraud with all our bank details, and your boss sacking you for seeing inappropriate pictures of you on Facebook ect. Events such as these can often destroy someone’s life. So that is why my digital beast is represented as destructive.

However, I believe a lot of this online paranoia is stuff we should be aware of, but not let it get in the way of using it for good things. The piece comes across as this is something to be feared of. But infact, if it wasn’t for the internet I wouldn’t have been able to create this track, as a lot of sounds used where recorded or downloaded off the net. I then used music programmes (which I had downloaded, rather than pay £700 or so) to sequence and manipulate them.

To conclude, it’s a double edged sword when defining if the internet is something to be feared of. As it offers amazing possibilities, but due to this it also creates fear of the unknown or unthinkable, like the depths of the ocean. Like I said earlier, this can excite both euphoria and fear. What if this power is the wrong hands? What if we misunderstand such powers in the world? What could happen? But in my case, I just used the internet’s power to aid me in being creative and make a piece of music to demonstrate our cultures latest anxiety and paranoia.