The video for HALF OF US is about the multiple realities we experience daily through our phones, laptops and social media – the best and worst sides of influencer culture, online identities, the infinite flow of information that we are exposed to every day. Its about the way we have changed not only the way we communicate and consume information, but the way we look at the world, what it means to be alive, and even how we see ourselves.
Through technology our lives have now spread across more than just one reality - we have added multiple layers and grades between what we think of as “real life” and the “virtual”. We are online personas, Instagram accounts and avatars. We are the tiny Uber icon driving from one place to the next, next to a rating of how polite we have been, linked to a bank account that exists outside of the physical world – while desperately trying to be “real” and deriding things that are “fake”.
We wanted the video to give you a sense of those layers of reality, and those connections to the real and the virtual- the way we are saturated with information, the way meanings behind them can get twisted, distorted or lost, and the effect it has on us.
The video has multiple layers of information hidden within it - which you won’t get the first time you watch it (or at least not on a conscious level). Just like with social media, information is flying past you at a rate that is too fast to really take in- tragedies which you have not got time to register, violence which is over before you can be shocked, beauty before you can feel anything and humor before you can laugh.
You can watch it all superficially – letting the meanings and references wash over you, or you can go into the video and uncover the subtexts and hidden messages the Miro Shot Collective has hidden within each frame.
A central theme to the song and video is the way social media can present a carefully curated version of someone’s #bestlife, fake news, promoted posts- the effect this can have on people following influencers, and the way people often treat one another online. All sides of humanity, burned forever into an endless stream of content- Caroline Flack’s recent suicide showed that this tool is becoming more powerful, and its use more reckless.
The track is about a friend of ours, a female gamer who eventually had to quit streaming because of the way she was treated by trolls online - effectively people who forgot that behind this social media persona, there was a real person- who acted in a way they would probably never have done if they had met her in real life.
A French surrealist art movement from the late 50s, the Situationists suggested that modern life meant being exposed to so many images, and so many reproductions of reality through film, photography and advertising, that there was now no longer such a thing as real life, or an original act or idea just an endless loop of reproductions.
They set about disrupting these images in a process they called “Détournement” in an attempt to shock society out of its trance. They would sabotage and alter advertising, manipulate and reworking images and symbols that were familiar, until they “broke” their meaning, often reversing their motives or intensions.
We see dancing girls next to cars exploding, or Esport gamers screaming at the screen after real footage of missiles being shot at villages. The meaning behind these images start to fragment, and we gradually start to loose sight of what is “good” and what is “bad”
Yes there are terabytes of useless information being blasted into our eyes and ears, yes there are trolls, jealousy, clickbait, #humblebrags, fail videos and doxing- but there are also amazing things happening every day thanks to these new tools. There are people connecting and building new lives for themselves, there are people learning skills and growing in ways they had only dreamed of. Mankind’s problem was always an inability to empathize, it was that sense of disconnection from one another that we assumed was just “the human condition”- now that we are becoming connected in such a profound way, we have no idea how to use it or how to act.
Change is coming- we may not be there yet, but we have started on the road towards it.
Human beings, through tech - connected in a way that religion promised us but never delivered, that political movements attempted but failed. It is terrifying and it is beautiful.
Facebook :
Instagram :
Twitter :
0 Comments