Lowside (part 1)
Lowside is a photographic artwork I made about 10 years ago. It took a while for the full story around it to form. The scene that was captured was obvious, but nothing up to that point was certain. It really has been a story 10 years in the making as I've been learning new things about our environment, and everything came together over the last few weeks.
I will be slowly sharing the story of Lowside in every few upcoming newsletters as I write it. I'm aware that my writing will be rough as I've never written a story for reading in 'real-time' before. But I'm looking forward to the experiment, and I hope you enjoy the journey as well.
LOWSIDE
It was Tuesday, just before midnight, the horizon lit up with a dull glow and the earth started shaking.
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Wednesday afternoon, eight of ten World Council members stood in the Chamber talking quickly, trying to make sense of what had happened, not that anyone knew exactly what it was that had occurred.
Susan, head media liaison for the World Council Chamber had her work cut out for her, sorting through thousands of media releases, social media posts, and potentially fake videos to try and figure out the spider web of events, as well as try to find the remaining two Council members. She did have a system of bots to weed out the obviously fake accounts, but an explosion that the entire world felt meant there were a lot more reports than normal, and from people who had never shown up on the radar before. Her server was struggling to keep up, and she was having to manually sort and check anything plausible.
There were reports of volcanic activity, nuclear facility meltdowns, atomic bombs, and earthquakes. The theory that had taken the most traction with social media and worldwide news reports was an attack from Mars, and this is what had the World Council a tad more than concerned.
An attack from Mars was a distinct possibility. After the last few billionaires had fled Earth a war of words commenced and all communication had been severed between the two planets. There was obvious tension on Earth for many decades that Mars would retaliate somehow but with no way of being able to see or hear what each other were doing for over 50 years, people on Earth seemed to accept that they weren't in any immediate danger, and went to focus on the environmental destruction left behind by those that fled.
ARTWORK
Lowside is available in my Inprnt shop here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/joyphillipsart/lowside/
SOCIAL MEDIA
I’ve been having a lot of fun over on Threads recently.
If you have an account over there, come and say hi! https://threads.net/@joyphillipsart