PROCESS:
We first thought of three dystopia ideas…
1.
In this world, all high school valedictorians are sent to a high-security college in a secluded location in which they learn the skills they need to lead a country effectively. This school essentially breeds the future presidents, congressmen, and senators. This way, it is ensured that all candidates are intelligent, qualified and capable. Once they graduate, they are given a new identity, and essentially breeded to hold a place in office. If they don’t succeed, however, they are left with no family, no friends, and no home.
While the government claims that this is the only way to ensure all candidates are capable of running the country without running into disaster, other underlying issues still remain. This includes the favoring of private school kids, the slacking of teenagers in high school who don’t want to have to give up their own ambitions and identities, therefore self sabotaging themselves. Leaders who don’t want to be leaders will never be good ones.
2.
In this world, water is intoxicating almost in the same way as alcohol is, and in order to think straight, you have to dehydrate yourself. Here, intellect and hardworking attitudes are not as valued as spontaneity and courage. People are either exhausted, red-eyed and wrinkled or they have perfect skin but are wild and rowdy. Poverty is easily detectable through dehydration, even though it’s not access to water that is the issue. They are forced into manual labor jobs, jobs in which they have to be clear minded. In order to complete these jobs, they cannot drink water. Essentially, people are forced to choose between having both poverty and health or paying the bills while their bodies decay.
In a world that functions this way, while simultaneously valuing beauty, leaders are typically reckless and polarizing. Candidates with wrinkles or red eyes, or any sort of trait that suggests they don’t drink as much water as they need to, are instantly unpopular among the rich–the group of people that hold the most influence. Elections usually accompany mass riots, violence, and widespread anger or destructive celebration–no in between. Essentially, this is a world where rationality is completely eradicated and only extreme behavior exists.
3.
In this world, the soil quality has deteriorated to make fresh fruits and vegetables a luxury only left for the rich. Junk food reigns supreme and there’s a spike in famine, malnutrition, as well as the other end– diabetes, obesity, heart failure and shortened life expectancy. The overall health of the population deteriorates and politics is thrown into a struggle to create policies that balance out this chaos.
Health becomes an attribute that only the rich can obtain, and the population begins to thin out. Regular people riot against such a turn of events and advocate for price drops or rationing– essentially anything that can ensure that the poor aren’t given a death sentence. The rich, of course, fight back. Social media is taken over by veganism and healthy dieting as wealth is no longer represented by clothing, but by fresh produce. Fruits and vegetables are suddenly markers of hierarchy, and inequality is exaggerated on every level.
I chose the water dystopia because it seemed to be the most visual to me. We then chose one idea and created a set of tarot cards to accompany it…
We then grouped up based on style and concept to create a group narrative and a collective set of tarot cards that would be submitted with a movie trailer…
FINAL PRODUCTS:
When water becomes a scarcity, a luxury, who should decide who gets to drink it? Does the administration get to play the role of God? In this case, they do. In the year 4027, most water sources became polluted, and portions of the population slowly began to panic as the problem that scientists warned about slowly became a reality. Despite the increased tensions and chaos, the prominence of vanity in the society at the time instigated a solution: dilution.
With social media reigning supreme, and beauty standards becoming more relevant, not just in popular culture, but even in employee selection and levels of respect received, rationality became completely eradicated. The obsession with aesthetic became a nation-sweeping epidemic. Product design goals moved away from effective and towards beautiful; 10-inch heels made of easily-shattered glass were not shied away from, even if they broke and drew blood; rose tinted mirrors that obscured image were bought over clear ones.
Why couldn’t this work with water? The government began to commercialize diluted water– a mixture of chemicals, nutrients, vitamins, intoxicants, and water that turned pink when concocted. After all, it was prettier than the pure alternative. A community’s vision already warped by their own expectations slowly became even more obscured as they consumed bottles upon bottles of this “new and improved” water. The rich boasted of their “constant bubbliness” and of their “problems essentially disappearing” while the poor trudged on, to work and back, with scarcity keeping them from both hydration and intoxication. While the rich have the power to instigate the exploration of a more sustainable solution, their minds are too skewed to form the idea to do so. The poor, however, are fatigued, losing strength, and losing their minds. The world around them feels increasingly more like bubblegum each day, but their bodies are so thirsty that they cannot do anything but try to survive.
However, there was hope. Panther, The Administrator’s son, found a vial of pure, undiluted, unpolluted water… and drank it. At that very moment the pink drunken haze cleared from his eyes and he truly saw the world for what it was. He was able to feel the excruciating pain his shark-tooth head choker was causing him, he was able to feel the heat of his fur coat on the warm summer day. He was able to to see that the poor people were suffering and not constantly waltzing. He was able to see how much of a chaos the world had really become. What was he to do at that point? Awaken the world and go back to the days of limited pure water and abundant thirst, or let people live an irrational, body-harming and unsensible life?
As a child maybe you’ve dreamt of a world where it feels as if you’re living inside of a gigantic bubblegum. A place where forests are filled with Christmas trees, a place where people walk on cotton candy, a place where cable carts are in the shape of hearts. When the world is this perfect, would you really want to wake up to the cold harsh reality? This is a dilemma that stands before Panther; to do the righteous and wake everyone up from their fantasyland dream, or to follow his father’s footstep in leading the nation to their grave.
Panther is well aware of what the world looks like to the citizens still consuming the “diluted water”, it is as if a filter’s been cast upon their vision, creating the illusion of a pastel colored world that is exempt from pain of all forms. Having grown up drinking the diluted water, reality took Panther in shock. He had to discover alone that roads are actually made up of cracked hard concrete, that forests are actually filled with withering trees and that cable carts are simply electricity cables that are way past their last maintenance. The once sweetly scented air suddenly became painful to even inhale.
The responsibility is suddenly upon Panther to decide the nation’s future.
