circumventing and disrupting norms in art and in advertising

In _empyre soft skinned space Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor discusses disrupting norms in art and in advertising. In particularthey discuss media theoris Bernard Steigler’s work on on the virulent unstoppable market of a web of data that we acknowledge today is often times subliminally positioned within the proliferation of value.

In “Viral Economy” Baudrillard writes about biological virus, terrorism, the stock market, company takeovers and specifically art as contagious. “…art, which is now everywhere subjected to the problem of the fake, the authentic, the copy, the clone, the simulation-a veritable contagion that de-stabilizes aesthetic values, causing them to lose their immunity as well- and simultaneously undergoing the delirious, speculative bidding wars of the art market.  It is no longer a market…”

Which “art-practices of those who circumvent, disrupt and critique the data streams of the virulent art market and those of advertising messages, images, videos and all the rest”: there are “a few historical marketing campaigns whose high-profile advertising agencies circumvented and disrupted old norms of image mass-marketing. These advertising messages were crafted to be personal and contemporary and were most times directed at specialized,
targeted audiences. At first glance these messages were not obvious as advertisements using gaming strategies, animation, avatars, You Tube, Flickr, blogging, among many others.  In all cases advertisers banked on the fact that their target customer would share the information with her
own social networks.” it worked.

See 2001 Burger King’s Subservient Chicken based on  TV ads ->online, viral marketing campaign ( disguised as interactive gaming site – a person in a chicken suit who interactively acts out instructiions – a sort of charades).  Lasted till 2007!

or Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign (sic) disguised as a music video in 2007 after the company was facing huge losses due to a batch of salmonella tainted chocolate.  The You Tube video received 50,000
hits during the first week of viewing.

The Total Blender ads- fake lab experiments – glow sticks. While introduced on You Tube the phrase Will it blend? has become a net meme. The Blendtec Company now not only sells their blenders but merchandise based on the infomercial’s star and originator, Tom Dickson. Dickson himself has become a celebrity in his own right appearing on late night TV and the history channel. A bit of Dali media icon happening here….

The Viral Factory is notorious for using mockumentary film or computer animation and viral seeding for advertising- emulating pornography for Dieselfor their 30th birthday. The charming viral featured clips from a raft of 80s porn films “consumers should continue to expect the unexpected” etc bla bla.

Parisian bike-for-hire – the vélib’

Paris’s free bicycles. Check this link to see an analysis of the bike -rental scheme in Paris. An interesting story from a Bangladeshi news source on this 1 yr old Parisian bike scheme

The velib bike

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Callum Morton’s Valhalla

Callum Morton’s Valhalla

His work Valhalla is a response and a replica I guess of a house his architect father built – he felt it was his father’s best work but also cause of a financial crisis which saw the house sold and family displaced, Valhalla- hand tagged by Morton with graffiti, pock-marked as if by shrapnel or shell attack and spewing smoke from the upper floor- takes it point of departure from deep-held memories of osmotically absorbed modernism and a familial back-story perhaps still not full articulated. (from SMH).

Valhalla

new video

a project i have been engaged with for a while…

student hurls boot boot at Howard

Not happy, John: Cambridge University student hurls Doc Marten boot at Howard.

A heckler has thrown a Doc Marten boot at former prime minister John Howard during a speech at Cambridge University.

Boris Groys::Aesthetic Responsibility

Boris Groys, Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility / Journal / e-flux.

Boris Groys brings up that ‘fear’ (on the part of practitioners in particular) that instead of actually changing the world, art only makes it look better “causes a great deal of frustration within the art system, in which the predominant mood appears to almost perpetually shift back and forth between hopes to intervene in the world beyond art and disappointment (even despair) due to the impossibility of achieving such a goal.

Groys resonse to this begins with “The problem is not art’s incapacity to become truly political. The problem is that today’s political sphere has already become aestheticized” (here he moves into the territory of the public face of politician generating large amounts of visual mnaterial – as do Hollywood stars…

sophie calle in the streets

She talks in a youtube  to a bunch of students at the European Graduate School about how after 7 years travel – she returned to Paris – and not knowing what to do and having lost her older friends, she decide to follow one person everyday and take phtos and notes. tpo be ruled by the route this person took. Liberating. A way to do something and to meet again her city.. Becoming more professional and following this man and losing him then meeting him again that night… and decided that was sign to stay with him and realised he was going to this place in Venice – she followed him there and followed him for a few weeks. These notes and photos became a book that was exhibited. The photos were secondary.

Then she met with a girlfriend who was working late – she invited her to stay – in her bed. her friend expressed how warm the bed was. Sophie decided for something to do, to invite strangers to sleep in her bed for 8 hrs – the baker etc – in exchange she took a photo every hour and a questionnaire – to keep it formal – not to be friends – a professional distance yest to maintain a a convesation on their habits. These people woiuld meet briefly the next bed occupant and talk. this lasted  1 week.

War is not a video game

A recent article in salon.com demonstartes the suble cultural
shift by armed forces marketing. In an reversal of the old “videogames makes people violent” polemic, the military forces are using the apparently
non-violent interface of hi-tech weaponry as an appeal to convince
people to enlist. “Join the armed forces, the ads suggest, and you
don’t have to experience the blood-and-guts consequences of combat.
Instead, you get to hang out stateside, entertaining yourself with a
glorified PlayStation.” This need by the military to show war as game is in the probably in face of Obama’s administration policy of gradual withdrawal.

EastSouthWestNorth: The Mysterious Village Surveillance Cameras

Village Surveillance Camera found

cameras on increase

Guilty caught on camera

The Mysterious Village Surveillance Cameras

According to this blog and a number of media agencies China has installed over 3 million security cameras in rural areas since 2003..

Engranaje video interaction

This project uses the denial of the depth of projection, which is what makes cinema exist, and the fundamental principals of the medium do not seem to be available
for creative operation. Yet when the invisible parts of the cinema are occupied, “cinema shows itself expanded”.

Check  the site ….In the exposed interface proposed for the editing of the movie  – with the sprocket  – there is a will to bring out the inner workings of the cinema machine.

The mystery of montage is revealed, a profanity witnessed by the audience. The place where cinema happens is put away from the screen (along the z axis), closer to the dimensions lost in the process. Benjamin notes that the mechanization of the medium reproduction in film causes a waste of theaura. In this project, the aura is somewhat restored, by the unicity of the performance (bringing in the risks of the theater performance) and by the presence of the author, whose presence, in film, is usually detached from the reception of the audience.

It’s a new hybrid form: it doesn’t fit in the cinema festivals (too non-linear) nor in the contemporary art world (too narrative). Yet, it’s the most compelling experience for the audience I could proportionate in my filmmaking career. The reception seems to be enhanced by the risks. The mistakes I make trying to create a new narrative end up creating unimagined meanings. Then my own reception enters the scene as a new player, influenced by the reactions of the public, feedbacking into the montage.