sinSign[dot]com

Last week we wrote about the social megamind, that mechanism powered by collective intelligence that is now almost ubiquitous in the so-called Web 2.0 wave of sites.

The recently-released After These Messages (still in beta) represents an interesting experiment in this arena, stimulating the participation of professionals and students of communication in the conversation about “the power that our messages yield,” viewed through the lens of ethics and in the context of the effects of communication (of any type) in society and culture.

I signed in a few days ago and went straight to review the Terry Richardson Lee Jeans campaign, my evaluation felt at the exact opposite side of the spectrum when compared with the average of 60 other reviews. That is beautiful, true intellectual democracy in action.

With time and sincere community involvement this website has the potential to add significant value to our thought process as professionals in this arena, which can therefore affect the outcome of our work. Hopefully its users will keep playing within the realm of ethics and away from moral judgment.

Thanks to my friend Aristides Barrios for the lead.

Posted by camilo at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week’s nightlife intelligencer from New York Magazine featured a review of the now one year old Fresa Salvaje, a multimedia celebration that combines “projections of kitschy Mexican movies and fashion ads played on the walls, (with) New York City’s Latin expatriate hipster elite pogo-bopped to Spanish-language, nouveau-eighties electropop and vintage rock.”

This event can be interpreted as another manifestation of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix Culture, with an interesting combination of old and new. Its curator was qualified as having “a highly discerning taste for retro-kitsch,” which essentially means an ability to bring back to life decades-old pop artists in a way that sounds relevant today.

At the end of the note there is a quote from an MTV employee condescendingly dismissing the trend as “nostalgic,” which caught my attention because it’s coming from someone representing the modern world of pop, the one that might eventually become trendy in 30 years. The question is then why 70’s pop can perfectly fit a Williamsburg party while modern Latin pop is bluntly rejected? I doubt is just nostalgia.

An article published in the October 15th issue of American Way brought me back to this question on a recent plane trip back from South America. Gregory Katz wrote a note about Ferrari titled “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in which a Ferrari executive justified their lack of investment in Advertising due to the fact that it is too ordinary for the brand, which solely relies on its sponsorship of Scuderia Ferrari to communicate key brand messages.

The structure of modern pop music relies on a hefty marketing machine that churns out advertising in all sizes and formats. It works to some extent because it turns these artists into celebrities with plenty of dollars attached to the status. However, on the other hand it creates rejection that might not necessarily be linked to the actual music but to what it represents. Advertising is then working as an invisible signifier for ordinary in the same way viewed by Ferrari’s brand folks. This might be a good reason why tons of indie bands fail at launch whenever picked up by a big record label: they get on the advertising train way too soon and it interferes with the development of a clear, relevant identity.

It is likely that we bump into some vintage Paulina Rubio in 2036, already stripped from all the baggage of advertising, within the virtual pages of the trendy nightlife guide of the future.

Posted by camilo at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Megamind

We would like to follow the previous post continuing with a revisionist look at Becoming Virtual. We need to keep in mind that this book was published almost a decade ago which can provide some context to the magnitude of Pierre Lévy’s vision of virtuality as it relates to present time.

The commercialization of collective intelligence can be considered an important milestone in the development of the web as a medium. Known as web2.0, the new wave of successful commercial enterprises on the internet share, among other things, the aggregation of the minds of its users. Lévy back in 1998 referred to it as the “social megamind,” the matter that shapes collective intelligence.

To better understand this fractal megamind and how it can be created for any purpose, it is important to revisit the four operations as presented in Lévy’s work:

“Acting on connectivity: setting up networks, opening gateways, distributing or restricting information, maintaining firewalls, filtering information, or even guaranteeing the safety of the group (communication, transport, commerce, training, social services, police, armies, governments, etc.)”

Open networks are almost always followed by policing in the shape of filtering software, cyber patrollers, or any other kind of control mechanism. This lesson was quickly learned by the NewsCorp team that took over My Space. It is well-known today that the company still struggles with the so-called “security” issue to the point that this year My Space hired a former federal prosecutor as its first chief security officer.

“Creating or modifying representations and images, and helping the languages in use and the signs in circulation to evolve (art, science, technology, industry, media, etc.)”

Probably the best example of this type of operation is del.icio.us. As a bookmark community, this site quickly became the quintessential example of folksonomy, however, an unnoticed effect has been the result of letting its users create their own tags. This democratic approach to tagging has led to an evolution of the language that refers to certain topics, representations, and areas of knowledge, reclassifying subjects into new definitions that take the form of tags.

“Creating, transforming, or maintaining tropisms, values, and social affects: good and evil, useful and harmful, pleasant and painful, beautiful and ugly (education, religion, philosophy, morality, etc.)”

Digg.com is a new species of the news site that is “all about user powered content,” every article featured on the site has been submitted, rated, or discarded by its own users. It is a perfect example of the megamind transforming, or maintaining tropism, trying to get rid of the censorship and control of the old media model.

“Modifying, displacing, enhancing, or diminishing the strength of the affects associated with a given representation in circulation (media, publicity, commerce, rhetoric)”

This is probably the oldest use of collective intelligence. Wikipedia comes to mind as a perfect example, it is the people’s encyclopedia, where anyone can modify, enhance, displace, or diminish the strength of anything related to anything. Knowledge growths at the speed of light and it also mutate at the same speed. Wikipedia is the electronic persona of the organic mind.

More about this subject soon.

Posted by camilo at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Is this an “either-or” situation? Apparently yes.

In an op-ed note by Joseph Epstein published last Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, the author of Friendship: An Exposé, philosophizes on the implications of one over the other, concluding that “in an ideal world, facts would reinforce and enrich ideas.” Epstein quickly reminds us that “this ideal world… hasn’t quite arrived.”

The dichotomy is logical: “the more facts one has at one’s command, the less is inspiration for ideas likely to arrive.” Facts are the very basic structure of knowledge and tend to grow as the walls of specialization. The stronger the facts, the highest and thickest the walls. This is probably the reason why innovation hardly happens within the strict realm of a particular discipline.

The case of the Advertising industry offers one of the clearest examples of this confrontation. The past decade has seen change at the speed of light and marketers are now under greater pressure to demonstrate the impact of advertising on their business. The combination of greater pressure on ROI and a fragmented media environment with infinite possibilities for dialogue (hear consumers back, quantify, measure, etc.) has led the industry towards previously unseen collaboration attempts between the science of direct marketing and the art of advertising.

The result: an inevitable clash of ideas versus facts.

Some agencies have merged and redefined themselves as the new breed of global groups. The most notorious so far is DraftFCB, which defines itself as a “marketing communications agency designed to build clients’ businesses by focusing on the individual and coming up with ideas that drive behavior in the most creative ways.”

In my opinion, the delivery of this promise depends on the ability of the Direct Marketing professional (who will rightfully lead the transformation in most cases) of not getting on the way of “conjecture, speculation, delightful mental footwork of all kinds,” and on the contrary, become an advocate for untested, factess, ideas. Ignorance drives innovation.

Posted by camilo at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the context of the attention economy, human attention is regarded as the ultimate currency. The theory says that in a world overwhelmed by information, the mere act of paying attention involves a value exchange. The viewer (or reader, listener, etc.), in this case has in her hands a limited amount of this currency and whoever wants it must play by the rules dictated by the framework of the new economy.

Some of the basic conventions that drive the economy of attention dictate that there has to be a value exchange in the communication process, which means that people must be compensated to watch, listen, read, via some sort of value added to the message. In addition, it is now more important than ever to master the elements of communication that maximize attention grabbing, such as design, style, storytelling, as well as the elements of human nature that direct awareness.

Richard Lanham in his book The Economics of Attention refers to those elements of human nature using a term borrowed from behavioral biology: the human biogrammar. According to Lanham this term “represents the stored-up impulse to pay attention to certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways.” Sex and sexual stimuli occupy a privileged space in the human biogrammar, which not only justify its prominent representation in the world of communications (from art to advertising), but also is a key motivation for the intensification of sexual images as the amount of information available grow exponentially in a way that the world has never experienced.

Radical increase of information sources = scanter attention as currency = stronger sexual content in communications. Especially in advertising.

In the previous post on this subject we provided the Jenna Jameson’s adicolor example. In that case sexuality was magnified through the use of an icon. Adidas didn’t have any need to show hard-core sex, as Jenna is hard-core sex herself, she signifies the modern porn industry and the mere association is enough.

In this second post we would like to offer a more explicit type of example: Shaïwear’s Summer 2006 interactive catalogue, which combines a clever clickable video technology (soon to be ubiquitous in most video-based catalogues as well as in webisodes from major US Network TV stations) with X-rated movies.

It is evident that the next step in sexual representation is at an early stage. In this example it is extremely easy to deviate the attention (far) away from the product, however, the effort shouldn’t be dismissed as a failure. A forum on the site demonstrates that there is a healthy exchange of commentary by consumers and that the brand is certainly associated with a particular statement. What is important is to keep an open mind and avoid falling in the trap of judging these efforts by the old rules of the game, for now our role might be as simple as just watch and enjoy.

Posted by camilo at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Virtuality

In the process of demonstrating the tradition of the virtual as a persistent “component of the human mind,” Pierre Lévy finishes the second chapter of his book Becoming Virtual as follows:

“My own body is the temporary actualization of an enormous hybrid, social, and technobiological hyperbody. The contemporary body resembles a flame. It is often tiny, isolated, separated, nearly motionless. Later, it moves outside itself, intensified by sports or drugs, is transmitted by means of a satellite, launches a virtual arm high in the air, flows through medical or communications networks. It entwines itself with the public body and burns with the same heat, shines with the same light as other body flames. It then returns, transformed, to its quasi-private sphere, and continues thus, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes alone with others. One day, it will detach itself completely from the hyperbody and vanish.”

Perhaps the days in which we are able to completely detach our virtual entity from the real thing (hyperbody) are not too far away. Lévy reminds us that the virtual has been with us for a long time: since the invention of tools that (virtually) extend body parts; mass media that create a collective eye, allowing us to experience the same event in a detached, collective manner; telephones that let us be here and there through extending our voice; and the more sophisticated virtual reality, so popular in the nineties when Becoming Virtual was published.

Since 2003, the virtual has a new expression in the form of Linden Lab’s Second Life. Free from the constrain of traditional massive multiplayer online 3D web games (that is, of being a “game”), Second Life (SL) virtualizes the economy, education, consumerism, flirting, vanity, experimentation, and the very basics of social interaction.

Pierre Lévy, back in 1998, was preparing us to accept a virtual space like SL on the grounds that we are, by nature, already virtual. That would explain the tremendous adoption rate of this technology/service, which grew from 920,000 to over one million members since last Monday. Way faster than the growth rate of 20% forecasted by The Economist last week.

Second Life is developing into something bigger than anything we have seen in the media space. It has the potential to aggregate all the technological features that make the Internet so practical, social, entertaining, multimedia, democratic, and most importantly, useful to hundreds of millions; and fuse them with an intuitive, easy-to-use, 3D interface that amplifies reality, adding an element of thrill and discovery to the equation.

Posted by camilo at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brooklyn-based Martha Rosler created this piece back in 1975 as yet another look at everyday life to denounce everyday life. Meaning develops by contrast, by disassociating familiar objects from familiar roles.

We should thank technology for making this piece easily available because it offers a number of relevant, current lessons to those of us dealing with communications.

Leveraging stereotypes in order to shatter them so objects, places, and people are freed from any unnecessary baggage of associations is probably an obvious one. If regarded without too much intellectuality, this can translate into a simple method to initiate an intelligent conversation with your audience. In the context of the attention economy, intelligent conversations add value to people and in some cases represent that token of appreciation that public communication must offer these days.

Posted by camilo at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At first glance, Ji Lee is a pioneer in facilitating semiotic disobedience. Take a second look and you will discover the beginning of what in the future can be regarded as “outdoor media 2.0,” or OOH2.0, which is probably a better fit for the acronym-obsessed business community.

OOH2.0 is the offline manifestation of the so-called Web 2.0 movement, which defines a new media model that exploits lightweight web-based businesses based on strong collective intelligence. People collaborating as opposed to just cold mathematical processing. Think of Wikipedia, del.icio.us, etc.

As any new media form, OOH2.0 is still not properly understood by the communications community, which most likely regards it as vandalism. Artists see it as another (if innovative) manifestation of activism. In reality Lee created a structure, a simple platform for people to participate in the advertising game on their own terms.

The bubble project has been defined as “a worldwide counterattack against aggressive public marketing,” through blank speech bubbles adhered to street advertising so anyone can alter the ad in a sort of clean, organized manner that sparks a collective conversation, replacing the monologue of traditional ads.

The project materialized in a book, “Talking Back: The Bubble Project,” published by Mark Batty Publisher in New York and that promises to be the first in an ongoing series. There is also an online version that keeps the project alive in real time with virtual bubbles inserted in digital photos (see below for a sample of my favorites).

As the artist himself expressed in multiple interviews, his work exists partly because traditional advertising has done a poor job at truly connecting with people. In my view the problem has always existed but now we actually see it courtesy of media fragmentation, which is an industry term for “choice.” Given the choice people will walk (or click) away from meaningless, boring ads. That is not to say that all advertising fall in this category but certainly there is plenty, enough to create a crisis in such a gigantic industry.

It will be interesting to see whether brands realize that street advertising does not have to be about advertising, that it can also be about art, people, or even useful objects. There are infinite ways to communicate and develop a dialogue that can make life a bit more interesting rather than a lot more boring. The Bubble Project ratifies that the old formula is obsolete.

Thanks to my good friend José Ignacio for the lead.

Posted by camilo at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Magazine as Artform was probably the most interesting (and fresh) panel last Saturday in the first day of Tokion’s Creativity Now 2006 conference. On the opposite end, the Non-Traditional Advertising panel was, in my view, the most boring, full of buzzwords threw at the public packaged with well-articulated thoughts and already traditional recipes.

What made the magazine panel so fresh is probably it’s context in a world of media that’s declaring the death of the printed word in favor of new media, that is, digital media. For instance, The Economist declared just a few months ago that the last newspaper reader will toss away the last copy in 2043, that is scary. Ironically all these bad news have been disseminated primarily through print media, which suggests some kind of mediatic paranoia taking place.

In the context of this paranoia, Saturday’s session at The Cooper Union reflected a different future, perhaps one that we could already see coming or suspect that is possible: the magazine as an object is, in some cases, an intimate part of a structure of meaning, larger that the magazine itself, and this will support the existence of the magazine, not as media but as a manifestation of the industry that it represents.

Oliver Zahm, co-founder of Purple Fashion, explained how beyond being a “personal object” (which therefore means that non-personal magazines are doomed to exists as catalogues on the internet or just disappear), the magazine, and specifically, the fashion magazine, is part of a system (not just an industry) and therefore indispensable to that system as it’s manifestation.

Zahm’s argument is not universal, nor is meant to be a prediction of the future, however, it places the fashion magazine (and I’m sure other genres) in a different category of media that is even more connected with it’s subject and combine with a series of other elements, which exist beyond the magazine, to produce meaning. This should be embraced at least as hope for those of us in love with the medium.

Posted by camilo at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s give another round of applause to YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. It is extremely hard to transcend the realm of quality and feelings when confronted with the Seoul-based (net) art group.

The Art of Sleep, the group’s latest piece is now available at Tate Online's net art space. The piece is accompanied by a second flash movie, The Art of Silence, which is based on an interview by Jemima Rellie in the context of their artistic practice. See a scrambled photographic excerpt of the interview at the end of this post.

The Art of Sleep is perhaps more cerebral than some of their earlier work but is loyal to their aesthetics and unique art/media form in every way. When compared to other pieces like Dakota (my personal favorite), it gives you more space to rationalize, to go beyond feelings, beyond the hypnotic state that these folks can and will induce in anyone willing to pay attention.

Please take a few minutes to enjoy their new virtual exhibit and don’t miss the interview, it transpires the same bluntness and honesty as their own art, which these days is highly appreciated.

Posted by camilo at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Browsing through the MIT Advertising Lab blog I bumped into a short note that referenced a Forbes article titled “Mad. Ave Goes (Soft) Porn,” this is of course an old subject, however, the authors reflect on the new status of porn and its relationship with upscale brands, which is not a new trend but a new combination.

Marshall McLuhan said that “All Advertisements Advertise Advertising,” which is the perfect description of the industry’s self-indulgence (slowly changing to accommodate the business of clients in the middle of the equation, but that’s another conversation), which is probably the genetic link between the two camps (advertising and porn). Thrilling, smart ads used to bring more business to agencies regardless of whether they actually did anything to the client’s bottom line; in the same arena, porn sells itself every time it gets produced.

Unlike other mainstream forms of communication, porn lacks the distraction of product integration, focus groups, overpaid celebrities (with exceptions), and multiple other factors that generate a combination of win-lose scenarios that only create noise. So at the end porn sells itself in the same way as the good old ad industry of the past (not extinct yet).

The Forbes article mentions the Jenna Jameson Adidas podcast and shows a small picture, here is the actual video so you can enjoy such a clever piece of advertising that is probably the quintessential example of the new cross-industry link.

Posted by camilo at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

London-based SHOWstudio is giving us the gift of Erwin Blumenfeld’s magic through a series of previously unreleased films on advertising. Experiments in Advertising: The Films of Erwin Blumenfeld is a virtual show of the photographer's experiments with film from 1958 to 1964, which makes the final product even more impressive given the level of technical skills needed to produce such work at that time.

An interview with Blumenfeld’s son Yorick, makes for an interesting companion piece to the films. A writer himself, Yorick Blumenfeld offers some insight on the motivations and general mindset of his father at the moment of producing these shorts.

Yorick also provides a blunt impression of his father’s feelings towards advertising and commercial work versus what he considered more artful, personal stuff. In this part the old dichotomy of art versus advertising comes afloat. In the context of his father’s autobiographical work, Yorick tells us that the photographer “felt that much of his time had been spent in a world of advertising, and making money, and he saw this as a form of prostitution,” which led to his self-portraits in the red light of Dutch prostitutes.

The fact that such a prominent figure of the world of fashion is reflected under such a strong moral light help us understand these rare films, which definitively depart from and land on the territory of art, but with the clear advertising aura throughout. This is why he was unable to sell them as TV commercials at that time (although they could probably make it to the small screen now), the paradigm reversed itself and came back to haunt him, the films were too pure for the advertising world, that is if pure is the exact opposite of prostitution in the stiff world of stereotypes (which are no more than empty signifiers).

In any case, the experimental TV spots of Erwin Blumenfeld are not only interesting to watch and extremely beautiful but offer us a vision of advertising that was ahead of his time. Once we are able to strip them from Barthes’ “moral feelings” it is easy to appreciate how the artist (?) had the vision of making something beautiful for his audience, of adding value to the people watching. Isn’t that the new trend, the base of the new wave of advertising?

Thanks again to Mogollon for contributing.

Posted by camilo at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As harsh as it sounds, this is exactly what an ad published in The Wall Street Journal this past August explained. Our focus today is not on the politics of the organization that made the ad, which, in my view deserve some credit. We would rather focus on the use of the figure of the enemy as an empty container of meaning.

The huge headline of the full-page piece read: “How do you deal with an enemy that has no government, no money trail and no qualms about killing women and children?” It then went on to reveal who the enemy is and focused on Hurricane Katrina as support.

This piece of advertising offers an excellent example to understand signifiers, which are empty containers by definition and can lead to a lot of fluff if not identified and tackled on time. What is interesting about them is that they have the potential to reflect a structure of thinking that seems to be embedded in western society: we tend to think in pairs simplifying and dismissing actual meaning under the pretext of associations.

Martin McQuillan, a professor in Cultural Theory and Analysis from the University of Leeds, offers great insight on how to break with the misleading pattern of western thinking (binary associations) in his introduction to Deconstruction: A Reader. First, it is important to understand what deconstruction teaches us, which is that “we should not assume that the way we perceive the world is the same as the world actually is.” So, the enemy is not necessarily the enemy.

When explaining binary oppositions, McQuillan uses the example of the “way the West has traditionally considered its other, the East,” and summarized a list of terms that characterized the way in which the East as a “non-Western world” has been represented, among the list of pairs are rational-irrational, recognizable-exotic, scientific-mystical, reason-superstition, etc. I’m sure you get the point.

Going back to Mother Nature as our ultimate enemy, the piece of advertising in question is successful in using an empty signifier to get our attention through all the preconceived connotations of fear and contempt that we usually associate with non-friends. However, by taking this shortcut, the add falls in the trap of binary associations and contradicts itself by simplifying the issue and pointing a finger towards the wrong enemy.

Posted by camilo at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new work of semiotic disobedience by London-based Banksy could be described as an absolutely brilliant contribution to the field. An article published in the BBC site early September explains the details of this superb stunt of messaging substitution.

In true alignment with Sonia Katyal’s definition of the recently coined concept that defines semiotic disobedience as a type of expression that “seeks to occupy and replace some forms of corporate speech in favor of an alternative message,” Bansky literally replaced Paris’ new album with his own interpretation of it in several record stores in the UK.

I find Bansky’s intervention extremely interesting because it leverages the democratic nature of new media in order to produce a piece of work that accomplishes something almost impossible for a guerrilla artist just a few years ago. The final piece is an album, as real as the one produced by the big corporate sponsorship, which amplifies his message to a whole new level.

What would be even more interesting is if Paris decides to fight back and intelligently intervene one of Bansky’s outdoor pieces, or perhaps follow him and make a music video. Anyway, in my view, the concept of semiotic disobedience could potentially burst into something more real if it ignores the good versus bad, art versus advertising, activists versus corporates dichotomies.

In any case we should appreciate and be grateful for the artist's contribution to a global conversation about nothing. I promise to write a review of the album (which I heard is remixed à la plunderphonics) as soon as I can get my hands on it.

I would like to thank my friends from Mogollon for bringing this article to my attention.

Posted by camilo at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Cameron Mitchell’s recently released “cinematic exercise” Shortbus is somehow a new breed within a family of films that, as Mitchell himself stated, try to understand whether “ultra-explicit sex can be used in a non-pornographic way (i.e., not focused on getting you off).” Mitchell certainly delivers in a fresh, unique way that differs from other films in the family that, as he recognizes in an essay about the film, deviate to an aggressive, violent, dark corner once the element of sex (ultra-explicit) is brought to the screen. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible comes to mind.

To understand whether there is indeed a new wave of sex films, we must ask ourselves: what turns a sex scene into an ultra-explicit one? The answer flows rather easily: an erect penis. In our macho society, the longer the erect male organ remains on screen, the more violent or pornographic the film. That seems to be part of a collective common sense.

The erect penises in Shortbus tell us a different story. They are used as visual cues that help us understand key characters in the film and perhaps even the director himself. The penises of this "cinematic experiment" are signs of humanness, non-violent, powerless, normal beings. This probably sets this movie in a new category of sexual expression that liberate reproductive organs from moral feelings.

And speaking of moral feeling, that reminds me of an essay by Roland Barthes titled The Romans in Films, in which he discusses “sweat” as a sign of, you guessed, moral feeling. Barthes explains: “Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself; we are here supposed to be in the locus of a horribly tormented virtue, that is, in the very locus of tragedy, and it is sweat which has the function of conveying this.”

Go see Shortbus, far from a pretentious art house film it is an entertaining, refreshing experience.

Posted by camilo at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review, Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University law professor, coins the already-popular term “semiotic disobedience” (a Google search today yielded 400 mentions), which can be considered (as stated on Katyal’s paper) a modernization of John Fiske’s “Semiotic Democracy.”

The central argument is not new but is presented in a way that enlightens and greatly contributes with the conversation surrounding intellectual property in the public space, collective intelligence, and the role of artists as the quintessential “attention economists” (extensively discussed by Richard A. Lanham in The Economics of Attention). Talking about finding innovation at the intersection of disciplines…

In Katyal’s words, “the objective of semiotic disobedience is to correct the marketplace of speech by occupying and transforming the semiotic “codes” within advertising.” She goes on to explain the different degrees of disobedience, which range from vandalism to reclaiming public space.

In this context, I find the work of an unknown artist that operates in the Union Sq subway station (New York City) extremely interesting, this person goes beyond vandalism to carefully intervene indoor billboards and surgically behead the human subject of the advertisements. I first noticed her work a few months ago through the brilliant intervention of a Target piece in which we could appreciate a perfect white square substituting the head of a surreal model that was enjoying time at the beauty salon.

Far from connotations of violence or vandalism, the work of this artist signifies the emptiness in the advertising message. This person literally uncovers what everyone can see when confronted with one of these ads: that it is empty. In my opinion, this does not necessarily mean that all advertising is superficial or that advertising itself is an empty discipline, as McLuhan denounced over thirty years ago when he asserted: “all advertisements, advertise, advertising.”

This anonymous artist is giving us a practical lesson, a reminder that society changed quite some time ago, that the role of advertising can’t be detached from the responsibility of adding value to the people it touches, which translates in a radically different use of the public space. Art sponsorship anyone?

Posted by camilo at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah brooklyn-based communications designer camilo la cruz blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah brooklyn-based artist francisco lopez blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. thank you.

Posted by camilo at 09:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)