[Texte disponible uniquement en anglais] Year: 2001

Medium: Macromedia Shockwave Flash

Revolt is the sixth chapter of Simian, the experimental web project developed by Ross Mawdsley in the early 2000s. Created in Flash, the work uses images, text, animation and interaction to construct a fragmented exploration of a world marked by war, civil disorder, violence and revolt.

Soldiers, police, weapons, maps, cities and fragments of information progressively emerge through navigation. A section devoted to Croatia overlays images and data relating to episodes of violence, while other screens connect geographically distant places within the same global scenario. The interface thus takes the form of an unstable archive, in which information, graphics and propaganda seem to continuously overlap.

At the centre of the work is the idea of revolt. “People are rising up and making a stand”, one of its texts declares, leading to the explicit reference to “The revolution will not be televised”. Political language intertwines with the symbolic universe of Simian, in which the figure of the ape becomes part of a narrative about contemporary society, conflict and freedom.

As in the other works of the Simian project, the narrative is not presented through a linear sequence. The viewer reconstructs it by exploring the interface and progressively revealing images, texts and connections. The browser thus becomes not simply the medium of the work, but the space in which a fragmented political imaginary is explored and reassembled.