Household Space and the Uncanny in a Carbon Footprint Ad

There's a very clever, subtle PSA promoting awareness of our carbon footprints, developed by the British agency AMV BBDO (the makers of the "Stop the Bullets" PSA mentioned in my last blog post). The new ad, Footprints, shows a series of scenes in which each person leaves behind gooey footprints of dark petroleum. The ad ends with a child's voiceover, "You have a carbon footprint which contributes to climate change. To discover yours and how to reduce it visit direct.gov. uk/ACTonCO2"

I'm especially interested in how the ad makes use of interior, domestic space. The opening shot is of an outdoor lamp illuminating a jovial party scene on a patio; a man leaves his affectionate companions and walks indoors, leaving the dark footprints behind him; a mother does laundry walking past her baby on the floor; a mother and daughter leave their car in the garage as they enter the house; children race around, leaving video games on an unattended computer monitor; a man gets out of a bathtub; friends lounge around a refrigerator's open door. So here, in contrast to most representations, carbon footprints are not presented as the products of vast factories or machines, but rather of individual persons, pointedly emphasizing individual responsibility at the level of the household.

This emphasis on domestic space is reinforced by the soundtrack, the opening lyrics of the 1969 song,"Shangri-la," by Ray Davies of the Kinks: "Now that you've find you've found your paradise/This is your kingdom to command/Your can go outside a polish your car/or sit by your fire in your Shangri-la..." The lyrics are loosely keyed to the images on screen ("polish your car" is tied to the scene of a mother and daughter getting out of a car; "sit by the fire" is linked to the scene of a lit computer screen, the modern equivalent of the fireplace)

The later lyrics of the original song (not in the ad) are considerably darker than the opening, indicating that the protagonist Arthur is trappped in a deeply alienating existence, with no way out. So inasmuch as memories of the original song might linger on among some of the audience, might the ad be read as an implicit critique of the bourgeois sensibility?

Watching the ad, I find myself thinking of Freud's famous observation that there is nothing more uncanny (Unheimliche, un-home-like) than the Home-like (Das Heimliche). In the seemingly familiar, comfortable environment of their home, there lurks a disturbing trace of the repressed, of all that which we would prefer to forget.

Guns Aestheticized: Reading an anti-gun PSA through Doug Kellner

I've been reading Douglas Kellner's fascinating book on mass-mediated gun culture in the United States, "Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shooting from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre." (Paradigm, 2008) The book is causing me to think carefully about the profound aestheticization of guns and gun-related violence in contemporary American and global culture. There is a nearly sacramental status afforded to guns and bullets, as prosthetic extensions of the masculine ego, in innumerable mass media images.

Reading Kellner, it occurs to me that this sensibility even informs works of media culture that are self-consciously opposed to gun violence. I find myself rethinking, for example, the well known British public service announcement, “Stop the Bullets, Kill the Gun." For more than a year, Choice FM’s anti-gun violence ad (produced by the London-based AMV BBDO) has been making the rounds on line, reproduced on YouTube and in other venues:

(See production credits at http://adsoftheworld.com/media/tv/choice_fm_choice_kill_the_gun )

Produced as part of the London radio station’s campaign against urban youth violence, especially "black-on-black" violence, the ad features slow-motion shots of a bullet exploding, in turn, an egg, a glass of milk, an apple, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a bottle of water, and a watermelon. The final screen is of the face of black youth; the bullet flying towards his head stops just before impact and turns into the words, “Stop the bullets. Kill the guns.”

The sequence of destroyed objects is presumably carefully chosen to build up towards the invisible spectacle of a human cranium being destroyed by a bullet. The final explosion, of the red fruit of the watermelon, foreshadows the (unseen) explosion of blood that would follow the bullet strike on the head of the black child.

I've been intrigued by the ad because of its allusions to high art, including contemporary stop-motion art photography and classical opera, but not quite sure what to make of these echoes. Kellner's analysis of the grand "Spectacle" of gun-related violence in modern society has encouraged me to thinking more carefully about why such high aesthetic values are brought to bear on the subject of gun violence in the ad.

I am not entirely sure of the precise artistic lineage of the image of the bullet strike. Perhaps, one of the sources here is the famous 1961-1963 series of “shooting pictures,” by the French contemporary artist Niki de Saint Phalle, in which a fired bullet exploded concealed paint containers.

The more proximate inspiration is presumably the work of the scientist and photographer Harold E. Edgerton, whose 1964 still shots, “Shooting the Apple” (also called “.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple”) and “Bullet Through Jack”, capture, through use of stroboscopy, a bullet passing through the objects.

One thinks as well of AP photographer Eddie Adams's famous 1968 image of South Vietnam's national police chief executing an alleged Vietcong insurgent. There must be innumerable other photographic and cinematic images of human heads exploding as bullets pass through them, that in one way or another inform the ad. It is even possible that among the iconographic inspirations are the famous photographs of Flight 77 (“the second plane”) passing through the second World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001.

Equally intriguing is the ad’s use as background music of the Bellini’s aria “Casta Diva” from Norma, perhaps best known Bel Canto aria of the 19th century. Was the selection chosen only because of its beauty and its fame, and to highlight the Edgerton-inspired aestheticization of the bullet strike? The music and moving image are carefully calibrated, so that the soprano sings the first word just as the bullet hits the first object.

Is there, as well, a clever deployment of the opera’s lyrics lurking in the background? The soundtrack plays the first three lines of the aria, in which Norma invokes the pure and chaste goddess of the moon:

Casta Diva, che inargenti
queste sacre antiche piante,
a noi volgi il bel sembiante

Translated by the Opera Guide:

"Chaste goddess, who dost bathe in silver light
These ancient, hallowed trees,
Turn thy fair face upon us."

Is the implication that the gun and the bullet are, in the current moment, our own sacred divinities? The unexpected slow motion beauty of the bullet strike gives a glimpse of eternal mystery, an effect heightened by the sublime music.

I can't help but wonder if it is entirely coincidence that final sung word in the ad is "sembiante" (appearance, semblance, face) just as our eye lingers on the face of the boy, suspended somewhere between life and death. In this sense, the ad might call to mind Roland Barthes' famous observation in Camera Lucida, when gazing at the photograph of the condemned criminal on the eve of his execution, "He is dead. And he is going to die." Photographs so often take us into strange temporal interzones, suspended between past, present and possible futures, and this ad would seem to exemplify and play upon those affordances. Perhaps the Bellini aria, with its stately rythmns, enforces an awareness of temporal sequence that intensifies the effects of the slow motion shots of the Phantom camera (capturing motion at 10,000 frames per second).

As in so many skillfully crafted PSAs the question of effectiveness is inevitably raised. Does the ad’s beauty simply heighten our contemporary cultural fixation with bullets and guns, as manifestations of the sacred? Or does the ad significantly undercut the great aesthetic value accorded to gun-related violence on television and in film? Reading Doug Kellner's important study, I'm inclined to think that the ad, despite the best of intentions, is so enmeshed with a hegemonic aesthetic that rends the speeding bullet sublime that it is unlikely to deter anyone from participating in gun violence...

Art and Evolution: Kiki Smith's Lucy's Daughters

I've just posted a video essay on Kiki Smith's wonderful silk screened art work, "Lucy's Daughters" (1990), which I first saw in a show curated by Margarite Evangeline at the Rose Art Museum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AJY0twpKIc&feature=channel_page

I'm especially struck by how the piece contrasts with the standard graphic framing of evolution in the popular imagination, typified by the unlinear "parade of man" visual trope, of the sort ridiculed by Stephen Jay Gould in his book "Wonderful Life.

Our hope is to get a kind of video dialogue going in advance of the symposium on art and evolution we're planning for "Darwin Day", the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12, 2009. I'd love to view some specific video responses to my video essay, as well as other commentaries about: (1)how artists have responded to evolutionary ideas, and (2) how, in turn, visual and other representational genres have helped to shape popular (and scientific) understandings of evolutionary processes.

I'm excited about YouTube's potentional for promoting stimulating video dialogues about problems in cultural theory and the interpretation of art, now that it is so easy for so many people to post video responses to videos that they encounter on line. I'm wondering how this kind of visual correspondence might itself evolve of over time. To be sure, quick video responses and counter-responses many not always encourage thoughtful reflection, but the medium does seem to have interesting "affordances" for the building of communities devoted to collaborative cultural analysis outside the bounds of the academy in a formal, institutional sense.

Beyond the general educational value of video essays themselves, I'm intrigued by the pedagogic possibilities of YouTube in the courses that I teach. Would it be a good idea to encourage or require students to post video responses to one another, perhaps pondering a specfic image, work of art, or other cultural phenomena? In small classes at least, one could initially limit the video dialogues to a closed group (the YouTube upper limit for closed access is 25 viewers) and then later go public with the video dialogue, I suppose, once we decided as a class that the video threads were ready to be shared with the wider universe. I still would want students to post carefully thought out written responses on line, but it does seem to me that the discipline of composing video essays (in which image, text and voice are thoughfully integrated) is a very useful one, especially if students were responsible to one another for crafting videos that responded to their peers' videos.

Interpreting a Gravestone in Greene County, Georgia

I've just posted a video essay on our new Cultural Production "video channel" about an enigmatic gravestone in the city cemetery of Greensboro, Georgia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCbXMnvfA4g

I came across the marker while doing research in cemetery for my book on slavery and memory in Georgia. At this point, I know nothing about the woman the marker commemorates, a Mary Irving who evidently passed away in 1828, other than what is inscribed on the slab. I'm fascinated that the details of her death (evidently from a venomous snake) are diagramed out on the slab. The visible slab, I should note, appears to be a recent reproduction, perhaps placed over the original slab after it faded due to the passage of time; I don't know how similar the modern images are to the ones made in the 1820s.

I'm curious about the potential use of i-movies as instructional devices, a usage that has been especially popularized by the wonderful scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama at Harvard. See a report at:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.07/21-kuriyama.html

What does this genre let us do that conventional illustrated essays can't quite do? What are the pros and cons of intentionally directing the viewer's gaze through the so-called "Ken Burns effect?" Should we be encouraging our students, in the interest of developing their oral expression and visual literacy to produce and submit these kinds of video essays in the context of academic courses?

Flags over Guantanamo Bay

In my first experimental "webisode" for our emerging Cultural Production "video channel" I reflect on a striking image from the entrance of "Camp Justice," the notorious detention camp on the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Please watch the video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZaVFJg0QsI


Comments and suggestions would be most welcome.

Webisodes on Critical Media Analysis: "Whopper Virgins"

We have been thinking, in Cultural Production, about ways to develop short “webisodes” (on line video segments) that would showcase and promote productive conversations in critical media analysis. Our initial idea has been to make short segments analyzing new television and print advertisements, integrating grad students and faculty in conversation with sampled footage of the ads themselves. We’ll see how this works out.

We’ll start with Burger King’s much-discussed, “Whopper Virgins” campaign, an ethnographic-style documentary chronicling the supposed journey of taste-testers to the the distant corners of the earth, exposing Greenland Inuit and Romanian and Thai villagers (supposedly new to Burger King or McDonald advertisements) to hamburgers. These various exotics, usually attired in traditional costume, then judge between the Whopper and the Big Mac. The short television ads, now running, are drawn from a skillfully produced larger eight minute “documentary’ on line at:

http://www.whoppervirgins.com/

The ads proclaim such phrases as "See what people thought, when nobody told them what to think," or "Unbiased. Unbelievable. Undeniable."

The blog buzz on the campaign, curiously, largely buys into the hype about Burger King reaching communities as yet ignorant of fast food: what right, some bloggers ask, does the corporation have to push unhealthy foods into new markets? Yet, at least for us in Cultural Production, our primary questions have centered on the ideological and affective dimensions on the campaign. At one level, the ad can be read as a rather standard exercise in American cultural imperialism, a latter day civilizing mission recruiting communities from the global antipodes into the tastes and sensibilities of Pax Americana, epitomized by the hamburger. Yet we also sense a curious wistfulness in the campaign, a joy by the American protagonists at being welcomed (and ultimately fed) by the rest of the world. Does this signal a post-post 9/11 desire (epitomized by the recent celebration over Obama’s election) by Americans to be welcomed once more back into the global fold? (To be sure, this reveujenated internationalism remains predicated on the sure assumption that deep down the rest of the world just wants to reconnect with its inner American essence, realized through the sacrament of the hamburger!)

We are puzzling over the best way to frame these kinds of conversation on line through web-based video: through our own talking heads, through sample ad footage with voiceover student and faculty commentary, through some of of interactive slide show? How do we promote critical readings of these media forms, without foreclosing important lines of conversation and interpretation that we may not have anticipated? Suggestions are most welcome...As we work on all of this, please stay tuned!

Projections on a Waterfall?

In a recent conversation with Ellen Hagney at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation we discussed the possibility of my Museums and Public Memory class (Brandeis University) in Spring 2009 doing some sort of multimedia installation around the museum and the site of old mills along the river. We are already planning a digital audio walking tour along the river banks, in which walkers would be able to call in via cell phones to hear edited recordings of community members sharing their memories of the river over the years, supplemented by recorded soundscapes of the river and perhaps electro acoustical music inspired by the river.

The idea that has especially intrigued us is developing some sort of video projection installation, perhaps in conjunction with the 2009 Boston CyberArts festival, projecting a video montage directly onto the Moody Street waterfall. (See our proposal on line.) This drop in the river in effect powered the initial creation of the American industrial revolution, providing the energy for the turbines of Francis Cabot Lowell's 1814 textile mill. The surface of the waterfall (and the water vapor generated by the churning waters) might provide an effective “portal” into the city’s history, perhaps going back to precolonial Native American timescapes through histories of colonization, industrialization and the demographic transformations of the community.

At this point, we are imagining some sort of creative compilation of old family and archival photographs of the river, art works inspired by the Charles perhaps videoed interviews of community members reminiscing about the river over time. This might be done in collaboration with some students in Ellen Schattschneider's Visuality and Culture course. Although the actual multimedia projector would be a relatively new piece of technology, the act of projection would hearken back to 19th century visual technologies, including magic lantern projection, such as the Haliotype of the 1850s. (We’d be interested in learning when magic lanterns projections first came to Waltham and what the subjects of this early displays were.)

More broadly, I hope our class learns more about the historical relationships between technologies of optical projection and emerging concepts of psychological projection. William James, for instance, uses the term “projection” extensively in reference both to external projection (in the sense of displacement) of interior psychological states upon an outer object, and internal projection on a kind of mental screen in the case of introspection. Was James specifically inspired by magic lantern displays? Visual projection dates back to at least the mid-17th century: to what extent were emerging modern conceptions of mind and interiority conditioned by these technologies?

In turn, is is interesting to ponder the increasing use of water vapor projection screens in many venues around the world: what precisely is the pleasure of these sorts of ephemeral surfaces? If the reigning experience of modernity is, in Marx’s terms (made famous by Marshall Berman) that “All that is Solid Melts into Air,” then are projections on vapor the purest expression of a modern, or postmodern, sensibility? At the same time, does the impulse to see into a wall of water evoke a primal desire to return to a uterine space, powered by what Freud long ago termed the "Oceanic feeling"?

In any event, we are eager to elicit thoughts from local community members on what might be imaged and imagined through projection installations on and around the waterfall.