Phase One

Foreward:

There are many grand narratives and modern day myths that continue to be perpetuated and passed on through song and spoken word. We are surrounded by archetypes; heroes and villains, story telling and myth are central to our popular culture and have become a very real currency of the information age.

The study of linguistics and the broader advent of structuralism suggested a form and a pattern to this collective psychology of language and as a science they have attempted to map these ever changing landscapes.

These various approaches uncovered hidden structures to our interwoven streams of language, but perhaps they are more fundamentally organic in their nature. When viewed as a separate entity or organism, they can be seen to have spawned many different strains of viral stories to create the dominant ideas and histories, a type of pandemic myth or evolutionary history.

At what point can we separate ourselves from our own language? Can we ever be truly objective?

Today we have a plethora of different media to generate and disseminate our various folklores and modern day myths. These stories are all pervasive and omnipresent, continually being recycled and recompressed so tightly that we don’t even notice when we are consuming them.

Myths are used to sell us products, create fear or happiness and entertain us; they mould public opinion and win politicians elections. The evening’s news becomes the Hollywood epic and both become all to quickly assimilated by the tidal shifts of the mass media.

They are collaged and recycled, multiplied and reproduced in the realms of our popular culture; the endless expanse of the Internet has become a fertile new frontier in this threshold of truth and fiction, rife with conspiracies and pregnant with gossip.

Existing between these platforms of information, these mythmaking breeding grounds; we have all become carriers. What was once perceived, as fact has now become a blur of factions.

It’s not so much the science of which source is right and which source is wrong, but rather which has more space to tell the story it wants to tell.

C. Allen