World Building - Man's Best Friend!

Artists' Statement

Our chosen world was one where dogs are revolting against humans and are trying to take over the world.  We decided that propaganda art would be the best form of art in order to convey the actuality of our new world.   Given this particular scenario, it was quite easy to enumerate several ways that the politics and social realities of our past would be reflected in this fictional world.  Many of our ideas stem from communist and dictatorial regimes in history, in particular the vast amounts of propaganda utilized by such establishments in order to brainwash citizens into believing certain opinions.

We decided that our general rule would be that mankind was meant to feel blessed and not cursed by this sociality, using the tagline “man’s best friend” as inspiration. From this, we selected a few pieces of famous propaganda media with which we could express this aesthetic, and through trial and error found those that worked best, then collaborated to create a visual and cultural body of work representing it.  Choosing pieces of propaganda with historical significance allowed our messages to become real and fit the canine world.  A lot of Russian propaganda was used as inspiration for this project. This type of propaganda brought a “Big Brother” type of feel.  Red, black, and yellow were the key colors we used on most of our posters to emphasize the concept of power. Photos of famous political leaders such as Stalin and Lenin were used. We photoshopped dogs faces over their faces to show how canines rule humans (or want to rule humans) in a communist government.

               In class we discussed certain pieces of media that exemplify the adjective “quirky”. By doing this, we found that these examples could be correlated with social and political topics like existentialism and hyper realism. We as a group decided to do something similar. We found things that were related with power and revolt and connected them with political powers. Concepts from the novel 1984, Russian propaganda, and communist theory were all things we found that were related to power and revolt.

               As a portion of this assignment was to ensure that the art correlated with society, we feel like we picked a good medium in the end (the flag, insignias, and posters) to accomplish that. Advertisements, commercials, and posters not only shaped Nazi and USSR society, but even shape society in modern America, either causing or being caused by specific socio-cultural elements of the time. Since we could not actually create a world where canines are taking over the planet, creating fictional propaganda was a relevant and successful method to emulate the environment that would exist in such a reality. We faced some bumps along the way and had to acknowledge and work with our weaknesses in digital design, but the end products, however imperfect, are tokens of our work and vision of this fictional world.