'Ubiquitous' video and evaluation.

For the Digital Cultures and Technologies Ubiquitous City brief, I decided to take a slightly more dystopian look at the role certain technologies might play in our future. I was pretty surprised to learn about RFID tags being inserted into humans, in the same sort of fashion that pets are chipped, so I decided to persue this direction for my video. The video I made is supposed to be a promotional video for a future corporation, trying to push their technology, and their social implementations of it, onto the various sections that make up the community of Leeds. 'Uni-Tag' was the name I came up with for the company, and their RFID technology was to be installed around Leeds to make it a safer, happier place to live (that's their corporate spiel anyway). I'd wanted to have a really neutral, female voice as the voice of the corporation, but everyone I know had too strong an accent for what I wanted. When I learnt about the at&t text to speech program I was massively pleased as theres a voice on there (Audrey, english UK, to give her her credits) that was perfect for what I wanted, even if it does sound like it's having a seizure when trying to pronounce some words. The visuals I used are just a simple selection of shots of streets in Leeds and a few shots of different pieces of RFID technology. There's a track by The Cinematic Orchestra running fairly quietly in the background to add to the corporate promotion vibe. A lot of my inspiration for the video came from reading about New Songdo City, currently under construction in South Korea, which will be heavily implementing RFID technology in the day to day living and running of the City.

My personal feelings about the implementation of RFID technology are mainly negative. I tried to give the podcast a bit of a balance by mentioning the potential use of tags in public transport, just so it wouldn't be a completely Orwellian view of things. The way I see it, RFID tags are essentially offering greater convenience, with the price being greater intrusiveness, less privacy and potentially discrimination and infringement of peoples freedoms. As far as I'm concerned, the modern life we lead has been made more than convenient enough already. There is no actual need for us to be able to ride the bus without getting money out or bypass the checkout process at supermarkets, it is by no means essential to our existence, and I think the risks tags present are far in excess of any benefits they currently offer.

To summarise honestly, I didn't really engage well with this brief, technology in general isn't of much interest to me, which I know shouldn't matter, if works been set you should do it regardless, but I found it hard to motivate myself to take an interest. I was also putting most of my efforts into the animation brief, as I found it considerably more captivating, and I see learning to use flash as being a very important skill. Still, there was enough time for me to have put a better effort into this brief.