Research and Practice module: Freedom of Movement campaign

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UWE Creative Technology MSc students worked with the West Holts Stage at Glastonbury Festival, designing interventions to discuss issues of migration and freedom of movement. With support from researchers from the UWE Global Migration Network, the Master students have developed project proposals for display in and around the stage during this year’s Festival.

This project is produced by Thomas Blundell, Haorui Lyu, Ryan Wheatley and Luke Worgan

Visual hypocrisy is an audio visual instillation supporting the freedom of movement at Glastonbury Festival's West Holts stage. With the UK government making it increasingly convoluted for non EU artists to attain visas to perform at the festival, and the humanitarian crisis of thousands of migrants dying in the Mediterranean, we were tasked with using the two video walls either side of the stage to bring this to issue to the audience.
Our Focus
Two core components resulted in our group working together: a focus on the contrasting and often hypocritical portrayal of the migrant crisis by British news media and the commitment to create visual material that would be effective with and without accompanied audio. We collectively chose to focus on this area after taking on board Steve Symons'- Stage Programmer & Event Production Manager at West Holts, call for visual
Fig.1. Project setup for presentation
The Four Videos
We each provided a 30-60 second video using separate techniques and technologies to comment on different aspects of the hypocrisy of British and world media
Composition 1. “Optimism Breaks”
Optimism breaks focuses on the contrast between the hopeful expectations of migrants to the often harsh unwelcoming reality they face when arriving at their destination. Focusing primarily on how United States receives the arrival of migrants in hope of a better, safer life, this composition uses powerful quotes of hope and inspiration against a backdrop of unsettling footage of what migrants really face. With additional quotes from politicians appearing in a dynamic typography, this piece conveys the coldness faced by migrants but also the power of hope in the human spirit.
Composition 2. “Underlying Dehumanisation”
The piece targets the dehumanisation of migrants fleeing to Europe from war and poverty. Using pre-existing media footage, the piece uses computer vision to track the bodies of migrants- distorting, censoring and targeting them. The result highlights is a clinical and criminalising portal of human beings only guilty of attempting only to survive for a better life. In the video, some migrants are seen to be blued and censored, while other are not. The seeming random selection of these individuals has the potential to remind an audience of the indiscriminate loss of family members, friends and loved ones
Composition 3. “Looking Forward Not Back”
Looking Forward Not Back Utilises UN statistics of migrant deaths in recent years to drive home the reality of the scale of human loss of life. Using royalty free
footage to contextualise these figures wit the bleak conditions where these lives are lost.
Composition 4 “Fundamental Hysterical to Present Hypocrisy
Fundamental Hysterical to Present Hypocrisy presents the differing attitudes toward migration between the era of British colonialism and the present day migrant crisis. Cutting archive footage of Britains emigrating to countries subject to the British Empire's conquest and present day portrait of migrants fleeing wart torn countries, the hypocrisy of British media is fundamentally exposed.
Results
Receiving feedback from observers we were able to gage the effectiveness of our work in its current state. We were able to determine our design ideas to be successful after Steve Symons confirming that elements within our installation were indeed what he was looking for the Freedom of Movement Camping at the west Holts stage.
However, there we're some areas that needed refinement. We realised that the videos best made sense when played separately, in-between other bits of media. This preventing the lines between videos from being blurred. Additionally, we we're alerted to people readiness for misinterpretation. To prevent this we agreed that a short description of the videos core message should be displayed at the start of each video.
Scope
According to Steve Symons, with some slight refinement by communicating with the creator of each video directly, he would like to use the videos for this years Glastonbury festival.

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