Consider carefully the metaphysical intent of the 3 finalists in the Video category for the Flash in The Can 2007 People’s Choice award (links at bottom). These are 3 extraordinarily slick big budget advertisements; if this is choice, then underwear is toilet paper. The motivation for these works is money.
The planet's economy demonstrates two major inefficient uses of its talents: building weapons and making advertisements. If an equivalent amount of money was spent on research into how to put people in need in contact with what they need as they need it, then the internet could eradicate advertisements.
Instead, plain and simple sell tactics predominate, competitively dressed up in immaculate streaming video. Intricate, absorbing, intoxicating and ultimately sterilizing, indoctrinating merchants of consumption and lifestyle flourish. Luminary philanthropists they are not; enormous money goes into advertisements. Very very little goes into digital poetry. The field is neglected because in general it emphasizes the non-transparency of information and language: it is hard to sell ambiguity. My Flash video work sells peace using aesthetics; seduces the autonomic into reveries with non-linear affect. I feel that epistemologies of peace and awareness and indeterminate knowledge must be absorptive by bodies.
A lot can be learned technically from advertisements; they are mastering direct embodied communication online. The intensity with which these sites play affect within the reader is profound. Their technical virtuosity is superlative. A parody of Allan Ginsberg's Howl in that the best young minds of our generation have become advertisers. The entwined juice of cognitive science, psychoanalytic insights, demographic studies, and extreme branding aesthetics (3D modelling, chroma-keyed and airbrushed sets, vector tweens joyously sprouting like candy-coloured orgasms) create evocative yet ultimately banal and manipulative excursions into the human body. The human autonomic nervous system is largely beyond the conscious control of any human. These ads leverage that truth and ad-ject new parameters of respect, desire and goals into those who watch them.
Propoganda, poetry and advertising share the same evolutionary roots: the insistent rhythm of reality exporting its resonant thoughts to others.
From the 3 ad-sites mentioned above, 3 basic design principles can be derived:
Load swiftly.
Auto-play.
Allow choice, but reward inertia.
The ad-sites following 3 basic metaphysical principles need to be refuted:
Lie. Profit. Kill.
What is art’s role?
Truth. Give. Love.
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Their dishonesty extends even into their names:
Friends of Orbit Bright – a racistly-white parody site promoting chewing gum and chastity (which makes me think of sex! and you?). Painfully obvious perpetual brand placements. It's aimed at tweeners.
Outlook Theatre – a car made glamorous through association with video vignettes of a perfect family and immaculate romantic moments. Light fluffy and efficient consumers. It's aimed at the wife archetype.
UFC66 – an Ultra fighting championship labyrinth full of snarling warriors and big time money. It's aimed at soldiers, the dispossessed and anyone who needs to fight to survive.
Labels: choice, flash, illusion, interactivity, video
