Montage of information — Interface/ Propaganda/ Internet/ Videos

“Nowadays, films live in a thousand and one forms on the internet. As short trailers, fragments, cloud-based copies of copies, endangered data, self-hosted vaults, and so on. Viewing cinema on a laptop screen is only possible when remembering that such an experience has little to do with cinema itself” (Metahaven 2016)

The Sprawl is a propaganda website about propaganda. The internet and social media have become platforms of propaganda in this digital age. We have been influenced and consuming propaganda unconsciously from the internet and social media such as memes, viral video clips, and even artworks that can be seen on our screens.

This meme is made by fragments of texts, photos, and hidden data being remixed together to create new feelings and another message to the audience. It can be seen as propaganda for feminism or as a provocation of sexism.

“As a hybrid, episodic documentary, “The Sprawl”‘s story isn’t linear. The film lends itself to be seen as a succession of impressions — a trailer, forever unfinished; the duration of each of those video pieces, or “shards,” is attuned to an attention span that is less cinema, and more internet” (Metahaven 2016)

Why “The Sprawl” is not a linear story?

That what makes this website become propaganda and interesting to follow its story. Most of the films we have seen are not linear and that makes the audience feel, attach, and interact more with the story. This is also the fact that makes this website very interesting because everything seems to be confusing, various, and chaotic at first glance. However, it makes us try to connect and make sense of the elements on the website before we realize that everything on the website actually helps each other to tell a story either less or more to our understanding. These confusing and likely unrelated pieces of information are purposely designed to tell us a story like a montage film, sending a strong message to raise awareness about another dimension of what is beyond our flat screens and what can be invisibly hidden to our eyes when we interact with the internet and social media. A montage film is contributed by collective fragments of information or stories to form a continuous whole; also known as a ‘distorted story’.

The way this website using videos and interface like montaging everything together is a very good metaphor to suggest a sense of knowing how data and systems of the internet would look like visually and to reflect on how people receive and affected by the distorted fragments of the information from the internet. Seeing just the interface might lead you to feel a certain feeling while seeing just the video may make you feel and get the other feeling and message, however, seeing them all together could also send you another whole story and feeling from seeing them individually.