COMMODIFIED: a thesis journal

After some feedback and thinking further, I’ve decided to do a shop-dropping project for this semester as the final part of my thesis. For those not familiar with the term, shop dropping is the opposite of shoplifting — i.e. placing homemade, fake, or altered objects into stores masquerading as items for sale. Some shop droppers make explicit that their items are free, and are interesting in screwing with the profit-based economy.

In my case, I’m interested in altering or inventing product signs and labels in order to satirize and exaggerate the absurdity of marketing rhetoric. While many culture jamming and shop dropping projects introduce objects into stores that clearly stand out as NOT being real products, I’m more interested in the “almost but not quite” experience (similar to the experience created by the ad generator). I want to modify products so that they don’t immediately stand out as being off, but allow for a double take, or create a moment of cognitive dissonance, awareness that the message is slightly off. Ideally I would also like thse messages to comment on the exploitation of desire in commercial messages — to make explicit the larger ideals that are being sold with the product.

Right now, I’m working on small label modifciations based on the paradigm of the “new improved formula!” and “now 30% faster!” kinds of messages that one frequently sees on products. I’m playing with using messages that either

(a) don’t make any sense in the context of the particular product

or

(b) point to the underlying ideals and desires that the product tries to represent.

A couple of mockups I’ve made include:

- On Neutrogena wrinkle cream: “30% more youth!”

- On Arm & Hammer Ultra Max Deodorant: “Now with less fat!”

- On Fiji bottled water: “Now 100% organic!”

I like these ideas, but I’m concerned that they’re too subtle. I need to think more about this and make more experiments to get the tone just right.

I haven’t posted in a really long time, so here’s an update on where I’m at with this project.

I finished the video project, which is entitled “Prime Time: A Word from our Sponsors”. It’s going to be shown in a group exhibition at the Melvin Art Gallery at Florida Southern College Feb. 2-27. A video clip is available here (not fabulous quality, but you can get the idea).

At the moment, I’m working on figuring out what I am going to make during the spring semester, and what the final installation will look like. At the moment, these are my thoughts:

My main point is to critique how advertising plays upon and coopts the language of our personal desires and values, and how it posits comsumerism as a pathway to achieviing our goals and fulfilling our desires. I was just making a little collage with material from my old Yoga Journal issues, and I was really struck by how the ad copy and the editorial copy were at times indistinguishable. Has advertising coopted the language of our goals and desires, or has the style of ad copy become the language of our own dialogues?

I want to create a piece that emphasizes this blurring of boundaries. My current idea involves creating a fake product line, with containers labeled with people’s desires and goals. I’m planning to use people’s goals from 43 things as source material. My initial sketch for this piece is shown above. These products would then be displayed on shelves that would flank a projection of the ad generator.

I’m pretty happy with this concept, but I’m still exploring a few other things. First of all, if I do create products, I would love to have a way to incorporate the sense of generation/mechanization into the piece. For example, it would be great to have a mechanical system that would print labels with text from 43 things and apply them to containers — sort of an assembly line. However, I really don’t see myself being able to create something like that, so I’m trying to brainstorm about ways to “fake” it or do it in a low tech way.

Also, I’ve been thinking that it would be interesting to make the comparison really stark, by taking real slogans and matching them with some non-ad text: either 43 things content, or maybe headlines from self-help/fitness/fashion magazines. However, I’m not sure what I would do with that content. Could it be incorporated into the product concept? What I really like about the product idea is that it adds a physical and tangible aspect to the piece, and I think that will really enhance the experience.

I’ve been developing the database for this video/commercials project and have been finding the conceptual process very challenging. I’m not sure what I am going to make with these videos, but I figured that if I’m doing some sort of algorithmic remix of words, video and sound, I should start by creating a database structure that is flexible enough to accomodate any number of outcomes. So, I’ve been cataloging all of the commercial videos I have digitized. First, I’m cataloging each shot by its visual language — are there people in the shot, are they men/women/children, is it a face closeup/full body/ body part, is there an image of the product on screen, is there text on screen, what type of product is it, etc. Then I’ve also been separating out audio clips of each word (excluding product names and conjunctions/articles/etc) and cataloging all of the words with the text of the word, the audio clip of the word, and which shot in the shots database it’s associated with.

The problem I’ve been encountering is that however I remix the media in the commercials, it doen’t read all that differently. I think it’s because of the way commercials are made — a large number of quick shots with sound bites. All the remixing also comes across as a large number of quick shots with sound bites, so it doen’t communicate much and I’m not finding the result very compelling. I’m thinking about trying other approaches, like making prints of stills, or juxtaposing audio with other visual media. I haven’t really come up with a compelling idea yet. I’m hoping that if I just start making lots of iterations, something will come together.

I also got a bit clearer about what I want to communicate with this piece. Rather than simply beng about the language and the relationship of word and image, I’m really looking at this as a kind of data visualization project. My idea is that each of these ads gets at some aspect of our deeper needs and desires. By collecting a number of commercials and remixing them in some way, I hope to create a piece whereby people can see the composite ideal that we are being sold/aspiring to. This understanding can be intuitive rather than intellectual, but I want people to have that sensation of stepping back and being able to “see the forest for the trees”, as it were. I want it to be beautiful, even if it’s ugly.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted so I thought I would write a little bit about where I’m at.

Midterm critiques went well. The feedback was generally that I was in a good place, and should think about ways to push the ideas even further — or as Adam put it, to turn the project(s) from something cool into something truly amazing. No pressure or anything :)

I can see that there is some “further” place, but I really have no idea what it is yet. I need to do a lot more reading and looking at other people’s work, but I can’t seem to find the time in the midst of all that I have to produce. Adam particularly recommended looking at people like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Jenny Holzer as a way of thinking about experimenting with scale and materials. I also think I need to play with more idea for ways to disseminate this work outside of the gallery environment.

Regarding production, I’ve finally started working on this video piece, but I honestly don’t know what it’s going to look (more…)

Impetus paper: Describing my inspiration and my thesis project’s raison d’etre

Domains and precedents: Situating my work in the context of fields of study and prior works

I’ve been working on the ad generator and now have version 2 live online (although I really like how it looks fullscreen as a standalone swf). I improved the language analysis so that there is a lot more complexity in what happens with the texts and I revamped the design a bit as well.