Oops!… Sony Did it Again
A couple of months or so ago, Sony, according to the Daily Mail, used
a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game.
The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console…. Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.
Hehe. The company do have a bit of a record for scandalous advertising and promotions (where is that fine line again, between fame and notoriety?); however, as we can read in the Guardian today, the Daily Mail has of course blown everything out of proportion (as usual). The facts are as follows:
the goat was not slaughtered onsite and games journalists were not invited to eat offal from its still warm body cavity. The goat was apparently ’sourced’ already dead from a local butcher.
Dear me. There you have it.
Art in Vyner Street, E2 – Artists Anonymous: 900 Calories
I went to explore the area near where we live here in London, yesterday, and my particular destination was Vyner Street, E2, as I had heard there were some galleries tucked away there, out of sight of the main hustle and bustle of the East End. Vyner Street has been described as
a gruesomely picturesque urban dumping ground of workshops, an abandoned church – and art galleries behind metal doors.
‘Behind metal doors’ hits the nail on the head. We first walked along Vyner Street and didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a gallery, quite the opposite. There were plenty of black cabs parked everywhere, some of which were being washed, and overall it just looked like an urban wasteland where you wouldn’t want to be after dark. I thought I had got my information wrong.
On walking back, however, we spotted an open door with a guy standing in the doorway, and I approached, dragging my half-unwilling BF with me. Thus we found a tiny gallery displaying work by Artists Anonymous, a Berlin/London art group apparently consisting of clean drug addicts. Their current show, in 32a Vyner Street, is called 900 Calories and displays, in the first of two small rooms layed out with artifical grass, a number of paintings from their various series [I think].
The paintings are trippy and immediately appealing/repelling, a visual attempt at the hyperreal, excess in information and noise, and colours. Somewhere you don’t want to go. For me it resonated with my first experience of coming back to London, back in January, when I was strongly repelled by the noise, dirt, and overall excess and acceleration that I hadn’t been used to for a long time.
The absence of silence in the mind.
The second room, up a couple of steps and again covered in green fake grass, had a bench and two videos of talking heads. My BF and I put on a set of headphones, to listen to a video each. ‘My’ video was a German language-one. A man, seemingly on some kind of exercise machine, was narrating a long monologue reciting his various experience with drugs, his breakdown, in what seemed to be a position of post-addiction (i.e. on the exercise machine, engaged in an – probably therapeutic – activity of ‘looking back’). The viewer took on the role of listener, of therapist.
Like the still paintings, the video too was overly artificial via the application of digital effects, in particular, some kind of blur and film grain filter, which made the narrator featureless. His lilt and accent was familiar, reminding me of some friends in Cologne who must come from the same area as this narrator (it was definitely not a Berlin accent).
The second video was a different guy, wearing what looked like white iPod headphones, lying on the artificial grass also used in the gallery, and apparently narrating exactly the same story in ‘live’ English translation. We subsequently talked to the artist present to find out how it was done. Apparently, after filming the first video, the second artist (a bilingual German/English speaker) put the audio of the first guy onto his mp3 player and was filmed while translating into English what he heard on his headphones. Thus, the result was a highly mediated, non-authentic experience in line with the artificial overexposure and digital effects that too were applied visually to the second video.
I liked it! Away from the personal nonsense and therapy-culture of what the mainstream tells us we have to do when ‘overcoming’ drugs. Away from ‘baring your soul’ and ‘communicating your deepest fears’, and instead communicating the artificiality not only of the experience of taking drugs but also of the aftermath, and placing it into a wider context of hyperexposure and pixelated digital effects and pixelated self, thus being much more about contemporary life and culture and far above and beyond any self-help and therapeutic self-wank.
Further info:
Artists Anonymous: Drugs (Review)
Artists Anonymous at Saatchi Online
I’ve subscribed to the Evil Media Empire of R. Murdoch_TM
I have now got Sky. There is a good reason for it too, which I’m not going to divulge in the weird privatepublicprivatesphere of my blog.
I’m somewhat pleased about it, in terms of increasing my 21st century-digital-culture-cred. I’m not a big TV junkie and I don’t really watch that much; however, it’s incredible what choice the Skybox suddenly gives us though we’re already used to Freeview. I also like the nice menues and the ‘interactivity’ aspect in some of the shows 
For those of you that don’t know – the evilness of R. Murdoch lies in the fact that he is totally in control of his media empire (which is one of the largest in the world):
He is one of the few chief executives of any multinational media corporation who controls the company by reason of his own stake in it, held via a family trust.
He’s got rather right-of-centre, ‘liberal’ political views, resulting in a rather one-sided (Bush supporting) reporting of the war in Iraq, and overall insidious dissemination of his redneck conservative fucking viewpoint through his multinational global media empire (remember he also bought myspace back in 2005). Other examples of his tight control was the censorship suffered by programs such as South Park and Family Guy, where controversial subject matter or rude language was simply edited out 
Let’s put it this way: I won’t be watching his shit, e.g. Sky News etc. I would have gone for Virgin Media instead, but they no longer have Sky on their schedule. And Sky’s what I need
/me is going to watch Derren Brown’s Trick or Treat now, followed by Peep Show (yes, both on terrestrial TV)
WiFi Across the City of London
This week, a wifi zone across the entire City of London (that’s the zone called the City, not actually the entire bloody city!!) launched. In what is described as “Europe’s most advanced outdoor WiFi network”, an area covering approximately a square mile will be accessible from anywhere within the zone. We’re slightly north-East of the zone though
The first month of this Wifi is free, due to sponsorship by Nokia. I might even try it out one day (before the free month expires). I want to taste teh future
Blogger and Podcaster Magazine
I’m sure this one will create a bit of a stir laugh confusion overall weird reaction in the blogosphere – a (printed, offline) magazine for Bloggers and Podcasters (as seen on the Guardian).
Actually I’ve had a quick look at it and it’s not all bad. I do like reading stuff offline, and I quite like the way in which the online version remediates an offline magazine, rather than a website. I.e you can even turn the pages as if it was offline (it can also be DLed). Now if they could send a proper review copy out to my address please, then I’ll give them a proper honest review. My blogging alone will give them publicity, so there! Also, I work in new media.
Email me, Blogger and Podcaster magazine, and I’ll give you my snail mail. I’m in London. Go on. You know you want to.
Win a Georgian 17-Room Mansion for £60, and other news
Yes, my daily reading of the BBC news feeds (I read the News Front Page and Technology feeds) always has interesting and refreshing results, and keeps me ‘in the know’ of what’s happening. Invaluable for someone like myself who has periods where she doesn’t have time to watch the news on the telly.
Today I learnt two invaluable news items:
- a man cut off his penis in a packed restaurant (he was taken to hospital but they were unable to put it back on – reminded me of a story that happened in Germany a while ago whereby a drugged up teenager cut off both his tongue and his penis with a pair of garden scissors, ouch!). ‘Penis removal’ even has a Wikipedia entry, for anyone interested in finding out more
- A Georgian mansion worth £650000 can be yours for £60. After failing to sell it on the open market, the owners decided to create an online competition, entry costs £60 and the number of entrants is limited to 25000. Someone should have advised them to prepare for VERY high amounts of traffic to the website – the site is down and has been ever since I tried it. I’m debating with myself whether to enter or not, should I ever manage to actually load the page and enter my details, before it all crashes (unlikely). A grand, listed 17-room mansion would certainly be suited to my occasional delusions of grandeur
Films Films Films!
The always pretty spot-on pomo k-punk has written a good review of Inland Empire, which I watched and tried to review a while ago.
It reminded me again of patterns, rhizomes, and the human desire to look for connections or ‘make sense’ where there was none, or rather, the ab-sense [ ] that were being replaced by networked nodes which the film follows along. Dancing along Lynch’s hole fetish.
That made me think of an upcoming British film that I definitely want to see, and thus strongly recommend: This is England (released April 27th). It’ s about a bunch of (working-class, initially non-rightwing) Skinheads in the 80s, set in England obviously. It reminded me of Made in Britain, the (brilliant) film that ‘made’ Tim Roth back in 1982.
Back to This is England. It’s directed by Shane Meadows, who also gave us the dark and brutal Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), which we watched one night at our mate J’s not so long ago. I’ve got high hopes for This is England and I’m hoping to see it next week some time. I wonder whether it’ll be released in Europe, probaby will, do try and see it people, if you can!
What is Advertising 2.0?
What is Advertising 2.0? It’s Advertising inspired by, but not restricted to, web 2.0. When Advertising first started, it told us about a product and why this product was good for us. This was the age of quite explicit, factual, no-nonsense advertising that simply purported to ‘tell it like it is’ (of course, the ‘facts’ were heavily doctored, for example, some cigarettes were advertised as being healthy and beneficial etc.). A funny OTT example of this is in the Truman Show, where Truman’s missus occasionally talks straight to the camera, holding a product up and flogging its benefits to the viewers (in films and increasingly, in games, you get similar ‘product placement’ but this is much more covert and subtle, e.g. a character using a Sony laptop, or drinking from a can of Coke, or using a Nokia phone).
Fast forward to 2007. Web advertising is coming of age. We all have pop-up blockers now, and we don’t really click on Google ads (how the f*** do they sell their Adsense to clients? There’s even been some research stating that people don’t trust sponsored links and nowadays most do in fact know the difference between natural and sponsored search results. Needless to say, the majority prefers ‘natural’ search results).
This is where Advertising 2.0 comes in. It reaches those savvy, aware consumers that no longer respond to traditional forms of advertising. Advertising 2.0 subtly engages with consumers, and it’s often a 2-way interaction. Think YouTube videos, viral content, cool stuff delivered via ‘word of mouth’. Note that this type of Advertising isn’t necessarily online. A beautiful book to read is William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2004). Set in the present, it’s really visionary (yet again!) and has a mystery about an online viral film (pubished in segments), a setting in the world of ad agencies, and a minor character that works in a new form of advertising:
“You’re in advertising? What do you do?”
“Look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up. While I’m at it, I mention a client’s product, of course favorably. I try to attract attention while I’m doing it, but attention of a favorable sort. I haven’t been doing it long, and I don’t think I like it.”
Later on, while chatting to Cayce socially in a pub, Cayce realises that Magda is doing the same thing in relation to a new segment, #135, of the mysterious online film, to create buzz surrounding it:
Cayce frowns. Magda’s story. Shown #135 prior to an evening’s assignment, then given a brief scripting: It is apparently a feature film, of unknown origin, very interesting somehow, intriguing, and has the one she addresses heard of it? And then debriefed, after, for responses, which she says is unique in her experience of the job so far. And where, Cayce had asked, had Magda been sent to spread this? A private club, Covent Garden: media people. She’d been taken in by a member, someone she’d been introduced to after the briefing, and left to work the room on her own.
There you have it. That’s Advertising 2.0 in a nutshell.
Eric Holter has written a brief article about his understanding of Advertising 2.0. He also mentions the Long Tail, which in my view is the way in which Advertising 2.0 works: it’s riding The Long Tail.
Peep Show – The Best Thing on the Telly?
Peep Show, probably the funniest TV series ever, is back. I hardly watch any telly at the moment, but Peep Show is always worth it. For a while it had looked as if series 3, which finished in 2005, would be the last one, due to lower-than-expected viewing figures. Don’t people have taste? It’s brilliant!
As a side note for my non-UK readers, the actors (Mitchell and Webb) also featured in a high-profile campaign forApple Mac back in January (it’s still ongoing I think), where Mitchell (Peep Show’s stuck-up, neurotic one) plays a PC and Webb (Peep Show’s lazy layabout druggie/musician) plays a Mac.
Anyhow, below is a clip from an earlier series of Peep Show. Enjoy 
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