Advertising does really define our world. In the Western culture of entertainment, advertising assumes the role of both structure and content.We can fake our rage against the machine, but are constantly putting our paws in the cookie jar. The focus on image and the culture of consumption objectifies all. Magic and imagination are purged of intangible value. We are attracted and inspired by diluted, vapid content. Like seeing a Caravaggio and only commenting on the dark shadowy lower half of the painting filled with the macabre of death. Commodity fetish riding on the rails of comfort.
---capitalism is a mode of relationship between people and with nature. as an alternative to capitalist relationships, buber proposed dialogical modes of relationships. for buber, religious socialism was the societal framework for the actualization of dialogue in the life of the community. in contrast to dialogue, the capitalist mode of relationship is characterized by the radical transformation of humans, animals and nature as a whole into malleable modalities of commodities. as commodities, every being and every institution created by human-beings has a tradeable economic value attached to it. beings and institutions are then produced, reproduced, purchased, sold or exchanged in the manner ...---Read More:http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-feasibility-of-dialogue.html
Dead People is a trademark. Those who control the advertising world seem to make the rules in the battleground of human consciousness.Herman Hesse: “the bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire” But all is not lost. “All it takes for any system to collapse is some applied chaos, a force that both snaps at the heels and is a curiously honored partner in both the most banal and outlandish of schemes.” ( BLF )
---THE closing books, of the Old Testament make but little mention of women as illustrating individual characteristics. The ideal woman is used more as a standard of comparison for good and for evil, the good woman representing the elements of success in building up the family, the tribe, the nation, as a devout worshiper of the God of Israel; the wicked woman, the elements of destruction in the downfall of great cities and nations. As woman is chosen to represent the extremes of human conditions she has no special reason to complain.---Read More:http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/wb/wb58.htm
The landscape of a thriving urban center should be filled with loud, discordant sound and imagery:
In such a cauldron, new thought and endeavor, through striving, competition and innovation is not only possible, it is inevitable. Billboards are one type of advertising communication that is unavoidable. Hence, we believe that these giant statement which occupy our shard landscape is fair game for anyone to utilize. The more signs, the better. We just take issue with the dumb messages most of them promote. A campaign like Apple’s “Think Different” series in the late 90s provided the public with many beautiful images.It’s just that they were selling their silly products (which I use by the way—same as you.) with images of Dead People.™ Read More:http://www.bombingscience.com/index.php/blog/viewThread/1433
---She could not read the writing herself; but she said, let the Prophet Daniel be called. The account she gives of the respect Nebuchadnezzar had for him, for his insight into the deepest mysteries, and of his goodness and wisdom, moved the king to summon Daniel into his presence. Daniel was now near ninety years of age, and for a long time had not been in court circles; but the queen dowager remembered him in the court of the king's father. She reminded her son of the high esteem in which he was held by his father. The interpretation which Daniel gave of these mystic characters was far from easing the king of his fears. Daniel being in years, and Belshazzar still young, he took greater liberty in dealing plainly with him than he had with his father. He read the warning as written on the wall: "Thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and thy kingdom is divided and rent from thee." Although the exposition of the handwriting was most discouraging, yet the king kept his promise, and put on Daniel the scarlet gown and the gold chain. Read More:http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/wb/wb58.htm image:http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/9/20/3893678.html
Jack Napier:
When a young mother fearing that her small, rambunctious children might be shot accidentally, complained to her next door neighbor, Alfred Jarry, about discharging firearms in the backyard of his suburban Parisian house, he brushes aside her concern by stating: should one of the ragamuffins catch a bullet and die that he, Alfred Jarry would effortlessly reconstitute the child through means Pataphysical….
…I’ve always identified with Mr. Jarry. Nowadays, interest in the history of Gay 90s Parisian alcoholic playwright and hooligan is to be found mostly with young students upon their first encountering stories of his antics and reading his brutal, sketchy, and sometimes quasi-pornographic plays and stories. For some reason, most older folks no longer find Jarry’s self-absorbed shenanigans to be as amusing and they’ve moved on to more serious art and culture models. These models while claiming to lay bare the inner meaning of (?), in point of fact, actually obscure all by explicating themselves in terms that are so intricate, intellectually dense and inscrutable that the average educated layman could never in a million years decipher the holy texts that support and define these epochal art and philosophy theories. (structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, situationism, etc. ad nausem) The observer, if her merely had the deep wisdom and knowledge of the gatekeepers, the philosophers and intellectuals, then doubtlessly he would understand all, as they do. The massive and ponderous monographs and scholarly works of these impressive philosophies are the domain of the high priests of culture. Much like Alchemists of the past, these scholars hold the keys to the meaning(s) of life (if you believe what they say as the average mideval peasant certainly believed the inscrutable nonsense. Alchemists would propound when discussing the Grail or transmuting base metals to gold or whatever other poppycock they were spinning at the time.)…
---Proponents say that these subversions of intended corporate messages can turn the “one-way information flow” of advertising into a public discourse that gives airtime to a silent majority who cannot afford privately controlled public spaces. They describe these activities as re-appropriating corporate-dominated channels of communication. In many cases, culture jammers try to use the strategies of Madison Avenue against it, but the effect of this activity is hard to gauge.---Read More:http://the
ofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/9/20/3893678.html click on image for more...The Surrealists and Dadaists were of course direct descendents of the thoroughly unexplained antics of Mr. Jarry. The best of them transcribed the images and textures of the increasingly insane world they saw and felt into their own brilliant (and never explicated) painting, text, sculpture and (for lack of a better phrase) public happenings. Some like Breton strove mightily to make sense of it all, in writings (or did he?)
Later the Situationist, ricocheting repeatedly off the one of two sound and newish ideas about symbols that they stumbled onto before and during one big street part in Paris in 1968 , would, standing directly on the shoulders of Mr. Jarry, claim to have it all out. I bring them up, because the BLF has for many years now been lumped in with Situationist thought and theory mostly by academics writing about the phenomenon of “Culture Jamming”. But I won’t bore you again with any of my doubtlessly trying opinions on this false movement….
1989. The "Think Different" campaign of Apple became "Think desillusioned". The company had appropriated the image of famous dead guys or exiled ones like the Dalai Lama. Read More:http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/billboard-liberation-fronts-ta.php
As for the Situationists, be entirely fair, I must say I admire some of the tenants that DeBord and Co. made their reputations on. It’s just that I relate more directly to the childish and possibly inscrutable antics of Jarry. Not only did he never really attempt to lay out his “philosophy” in prose, he didn’t need to. Stories and myths about Jarry, bolstered by the impenetrable CLARITY of his writings and the completely opaque yet airily illuminating philosophy of Pataphysics have insured that his memory and how he both viewed and moved through the world continue to be an inspiration for the young, students and irresponsible old people for years to come. Read More:http://www.bombingscience.com/index.php/blog/viewThread/1433
ADDENDUM:
Kimberly Chun:As cultural critic Mark Dery defines it, “jamming” started out as a “CB slang of interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations with fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities and other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols.”
Others, like filmmaker Craig Baldwin-who is known for his Negativland documentary, Sonic Outlaws, and less known for the billboard alterations he carries out with his own gang of pranksters, the Urban Rats-see the act as a natural, almost folk art, response to the pervasiveness of advertising in the urban environment….
---Apple's first logo was designed by Steve Jobs and drawn by Ronald Wayne depicting,Sir.Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.The word 'Apple Computers' were drawn on a ribbon banner ornamenting the picture frame,and the frame itself have a quotation from words Wordsworth; "Newton...A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought...Alone"---Read More:http://true-color-of-mind.blogspot.com/2011/04/meaning-behind-apples-logo.html
…He wishes billboards would be abolished, as they are in Hawaii and Oregon, but “meanwhile I’ll meet advertising on its own terms. I don’t have the luxury of choosing my battlefield,” says the frenetic San Franciscan. “It may be more effective to invert the received language of advertising, and that’s a challenge and measure of your ingenuity, pluck and wit.” Billboard modification is in keeping with a Northern Californian tradition of communitarian ideals, which involves people communicating among themselves and not through banks, networks or producers of mass media, Baldwin believes. Its predecessors and successors were the street theater activists the Diggers, ’70s-era East Bay anarchists such as Point Blank! and later the Silicon Valley hackers. Read More:http://www.art-omma.org/issue6/text/Chun.htm
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---1997. Alteration of a Levi's billboard overlooking a major highway. BLF issued a press release in which they introduced Charles Manson, a figure who didn't need any introduction, as the new corporate spokesman of the jeans' company. This historic collaboration between two of most potent iconic forces of the 1960's taps into a frothy zeitgeist of manipulative nostalgia.---Read More:http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/billboard-liberation-fronts-ta.php
The rudest awakening came with W&K’s cleverest of schemes: in May 1999, with labor scandals still hanging over the swoosh, the agency approached Ralph Nader – the consumer-rights movement’s most powerful leader and a folk hero for his attacks on multinational corporations – and asked him to do a Nike ad. The idea was simple: Nader would get $25,000 for holding up an Air 120 sneaker and saying, “another shameless attempt by Nike to sell shoes.” A letter sent to Nader’s office from Nike headquarters explained that “what we are asking is for Ralph, as the country’s most prominent consumer advocate, to take a light-hearted jab at us. This is a very Nike-like thing to do in our ads.” Nader, never known for being light of heart, would only say, “Look at the gall of those guys.” Read More:http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/9/20/3893678.html
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Roszak:The PC was considered a people's technology, a guerrilla technology, one of the last gasps of countercultural rebellion. In a larger sense, Big Brother in Apple's "1984" TV spot was not just IBM but the elephantine military-industrial complex. It was everything big and domineering and slick, the whole corporate world of men in suits. Apple's idealism was marvelous, but how sadly misplaced. Perhaps we can see that now in the wake of the dot-com bust. We have watched high tech become the next wave in big-bucks global industrialism, the property of the crass and the cunning, who are no more interested in empowering the people than General Motors was. The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it's a mixed blessing.....Read More:http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0128-05.htm image:http://mgsnyder.typepad.com/mgsnyder/
Eventually the rainbow colors in the Apple logo were replaced,by a monochrome theme of steel with a light shining behind it,but more interestingly let us the look at the byte in the Apple’s Logo;
---The more bytes,more intelligence,the more information you can store or process faster. So what fruit is the apple referring to? Is it the Newton's apple that fell on to his head,when he got the idea for how gravity works.Many have speculated that it is the reference to the father of modern computer Alan Turing,who imprisoned on the charges of homosexuality,in 1952.He was first subjected to chemical castration,treatment with female hormones,and in 1954,he eventually killed himself by taking a bite of a cyanide injected apple.Also Alan's favorite childhood story was Snow-White,where she falls asleep forever on eating an poisoned apple,to be later woken up by a prince. Or may be a reference to the forbidden fruit in the 'Garden of Eden'.,The bite taken out of it suggest that it is.if this is a reference to the apple 'Tree of knowledge of good and evil' in the Garden of Eden,then what does the Apple company referring to,Eve,the Serpent or may be the knowledge itself (Malum in Latin means both evil and apple).It is apple aligning themselves with the adversary,duality,snake or the Lucifer,the rebel and the liberator of God's monotheistic tyranny.---Read More:http://true-color-of-mind.blogspot.com/2011/04/meaning-behind-apples-logo.html
Roszak:Sound judgment, good citizenship, being “smart” in the best sense of the word has never had anything to do with information. The real irony in Apple’s charmingly defiant “1984” commercial is that it failed to understand that the Macintosh too represented Big Brother. Deifying the computer and downgrading the human mind are the first steps toward enslaving ourselves to our own technology. Read More:http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0128-05.htm
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