The Medium
We Are Angry was produced by Digital Fables, a multimedia production house interested in making compelling stories with a wide range of media to add context and depth.
There has been a surge in multimedia storytelling in reportage and memoirs from both mainstream media like the New York Times and independent initiatives like Cowbird and CDS. The Electronic Literature Organization and others have long been fostering transmedia/transliteracy/new media/hypertext narrative fusions of video, art and games. Yet rarely is the wealth of media available - photographs, video, soundbites, soundscapes, good old fashioned writing, background facts and editorials, statistics, graphics, cartoons, animation, and more - all used in fiction. Nor are other realms of art - visual art, performance art, music - very often fused with text to create a new storytelling experience that technology now enables.
Why? We are living in mixed media times and yet rarely do we find the media coalescing in a truly integrated and artistic way, a way that could take storytelling - especially issue-based storytelling - to another level, not replacing books or the linear text experience, but offering another construct.
We Are Angry is an attempt, a humble first attempt, at doing this: creating 360 degree digital fiction.
The Message
Digital Fables is spearheaded by Lyndee Prickitt, an American woman who has lived in India for nine years. As a woman, a mother of a daughter and a multimedia journalist, the message of We Are Angry is as important as the medium, digital fiction.
After the upsettingly brutal December 16, 2012 gang-rape in New Delhi people in India, and beyond, felt a need to express their anger, fears and deliberations about why this was happening. Women and men took to the streets to put a voice to their anger. Social media swelled with introspection and pontification. Anonymous mourners created real life and online commemorations. Movie stars satirized and campaigned. Artists painted street walls and canvasses. Actors staged plays in local parks and international cultural festivals. Screenwriters wrote movies. Singers sang.
The conversation across the nation changed. Women and their rights was not just a matter for earnest do-gooders and NGOs to beat on about, but the topic du jour and the inspiration for a panoply of expression for weeks and months. And then the din quietened. People tired of talking about how women, at home and abroad, have been and should be treated.
We Are Angry is an effort to keep the conversation alive - fusing traditional fictional text storytelling with other media, bolstered by real news content and annotations, and showcasing a range of art and expression from a team of people who want to harness their anger and work creatively for change.