Rapture Technologies

When creating these videos and ads we meant to, by suggestion, create a world much larger than the media we chose to convey it. They serve as a sort of design fiction, and in Bleeker's words are "totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds."  Jake Wyatt understands this concept intuitively and displays it in his webcomic Necropolis, where what is shown hints at a world of breathtaking and mysterious dimensions.

The world we created is set in our world, in the future. Technology and medicine have evolved to the point where aging and dying have effectively been halted...but population growth has continued unabated. In such a world, the Rapture Movement was formed to offer people an incentive to “pass on,” an experience heretofore unknown that in a perverse twisting of something like the Make-A-Wish foundation grants them their dying wish (or makes them feel like it was granted.) The way it is marketed makes it seem like the responsible, ethical, caring and adventurous thing to do, but there is a problem: The people who are being encouraged to “rapture” are not the aged, affluent citizens in their sixteenth decade of life, but the poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill, conveniently being “raptured” out of society, quietly, guiltlessly. Gavin, an internet personality that runs a channel called _Fallen_Empires_, smells something fishy. He is using his channel and substantial following to lash out and create a conversation to counter the sleek, appealing ads Rapture puts out.

The video was therefore designed to look like a webcast. Disheveled hair, scruff, shirt inside-out (Gavin doesn’t know!) but still relatively young, Gavin is meant to channel the disgruntled, suspicious, idealistic young citizen.His video is choppy and pasted together, coherent but not quite cohesive. As part of his image he wants to portray that he doesn’t care enough to film and re-film his segment (even if he did, secretly), he’d rather edit a single take to pieces and back together again. It’s his way of showing he trusts his viewers to trust him.

Drew represented the “establishment,” advertising Rapture itself. He meant to show Rapture in a positive light, making it truly an appealing option. Danny creates a more stylized ad that would appeal to the general population with its straightforward, hopeful, almost religious tone.

Now finished with this particular bit of work, I am left wanting to know more about this world we have glimpsed into. What we created may have been fiction, yet it finds an odd sort of reality in the folds of my imagination.