The Department of CoRrections was inspired by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the 54th greatest British film of all time, Brazil, and the New York City Department of Correction. Despite your knowing smirks, it’s not a fetish thing.
Shame on you.
In the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which many of you will have read*, as well as administering “truth”, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, “truth” is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. We’ve consulted our CCTV monitors and various “fact checkers” and decided we are all for that.
The look of the Department was inspired by the 1939’s World’s Fair poster and the various official messages from the period, mostly regarding sexual and mental health.
The AI image machine, MidJourney, was used to generate the posters with reference to the 1939 style, a real life exercise in Retro-Futurism. Another AI, Stable Diffusion, helped the videos take life, whilst a light sprinkling of ChatGPT may be found amongst the well-crafted prose.
But why, damn it, why?!
The idea comes from the surroundings of our event – the wonderfully evocative Magna, a vast building, a third of a mile long and 150 feet high – the amazing technology of our newest electric and the never-ending battle to win hearts and minds for the sideloader concept. Just when you’re getting somewhere, a new forklift gets launched like this…
Imagine if the Department was trying to keep the truth away from you! Scared that you might find out the dangers of handling long loads like this. Scary, but we must admit, they do look cool in gas masks.