Perhaps this is a waste of brainspace and furthers BMW’s viral ambitions (a common lament on this blog), but I can’t pass on commenting about this horrendous excuse for invasive marketing. As you can see from the video’s presentation, audiences were subjected to the old afterimage trick of burning an image into their retinal cones so as to produce a floating BMW in their vision. This was one of the first experiments conducted by Descartes that led him to formulate his famous aphorism, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). He noted that the afterimage proved that all mental images were internal physiological impressions which could only mean that any thoughts we have would be essentially visual representations of reality– the same kind of thinking that dominates a mechanistic view of cognition.

In terms of marketing, it follows, then, that if the advertiser can impress in your mind its brand, it can then program your choices and thoughts. This kind of totalitarian view of humanity should send shivers up our collective spine. But instead, these kinds of tactics are hailed as revolutionary and worthy of awe. In BMW’s own hype-machine voice (“Involve me. And I will understand.”), the campaign wants to “astonish” the viewers, which is supposed to translate as some kind of empowerment. The ad gets even creepier when the motorcyclist says he pursues power because it is his dream, one presumably implanted by BMW like an “inception” (from the movie of the same title). The subtext, if anyone is paying attention, is that the dream of personal power and velocity (never mind the consequences for the environment and our culture of speed) is enabled by BMW’s invasion of our dreamspace. BMW wants its dreams to be ours, while letting us think the dream is our own.

Really? It makes one wonder what BMW means by “understand.” Luckily this vision of how the human mind functions in the environment is actually not what happens. From the view of ecological intelligence and communication, ideas are “disturbances.” They trigger responses, but don’t control them. Such was the case when I saw this video; the ad caused an oppositional response as opposed to the preferred reading that BMW intended (indeed, the anti-BMW responses on the video’s YouTube page are quite funny and telling). This won’t be the case for lots of people, but through education and interventions like this, perhaps the stupid conjuring of over-paid cognitive magicians will end up in the digital dustbins of history.

The Multiproduct Commercial from Therefore Productions on Vimeo.

What if every thought was tied to a brand? Though this video is intended to parody a recession-hit ad industry, I find it a humorous vision of a dystopic world in which every impulse and desire has an associated brand remedy. Additionally, it captures the fleeting loyalty of a product saturated reality. Shattered attention and the decentered world of marketing leads to a reality mash-up with little coherence except for displacement that can only be stabilized through consumption.

Talk about a bad feedback loop.

OK, so I took the bate. The Billboard Family is selling itself out to any advertisers who dares sponsor their zany publicity stunt. Bur really? Selling your children to advertisers?????????? I thought slavery was outlawed with the Thirteenth Amendment. This is Ideocaracy.

CNN’s recent re-branding effort, “Go Beyond Borders,” presents a bit of a conundrum for me. On the one hand this is a brilliant marketing campaign that is also educational and interactive. On the other hand, it really bleeds the line between marketing, history and interpassivity–designing carefully controlled parameters of interactive media that are “free” in aesthetic only.

Here CNN re-brands itself as “borderless,” yet it’s not just any border. It carefully chooses an event whose symbolism as the triumph of capitalism cannot be ignored. At a time when capitalist ideology should be challenged by media, CNN intrenches itself as the premiere network of capitalist dogma, incorporating the various signs and trademarks of the system’s triumphs– the fall of communism, art, marketing and networked technology–to bundle them into their own nifty little neoliberal package.

Is this something to be concerned about? Commercialism has penetrated every aspect of public life. I know I’m old school when I argue for a clear line between the public good and corporate interests, whereas others would say, what’s the big deal? Maybe it shows that corporations are responsive to the public good. Yet, as is the case with BP, it’s one thing to brand yourself and side with a particular outlook, it’s another thing to practice it. Given a choice between CNN and Fox, I would certainly prefer CNN, but I would hardly call the network virtuous. It certainly remains a primary propaganda arm of global capital. This is not a conspiracy, just business. After all, which “side” do you think Time Warner Inc. is on? Wall Street’s or yours?

I suppose the world is more nuanced than my cartoon, punk rock version of it, yet it’s still hard for me stomach this marketing ploy couched as a history lesson.

(Check out Greenpeace’s re-brand BP page)

An interesting item from the Huff Post: BP is greenwashing Google searches through paid ad placements. I haven’t commented yet on the spill because this catastrophe is so huge, I can’t seem to contain it. A quick thought, though, related to this post’s lead: I think it’s interesting (and predictable) that BP’s history of greenwashing would translate as actual clean-up strategy. The use of chemical oil disbursements, for example, eliminates the visual scourge of oil slicks while poisoning the ocean bottom and doing little to stop the underwater oil plumes. Is this not a perfect metaphor for the psychic effects of greenwashing?

Finally, more fodder for the doublethink department: I’m increasingly concerned that the Right is using this spill to attack environmentalists, using their PR witchcraft to power an unconscionable noise machine. As always I hope that people will see through this, especially when oil starts raining down on rich coastal communities during hurricane season. Golf courses and McMansions offer no shelter from evil.

It reminds me of a scene in Three Kings when the Iraqi soldier pours oil down George Clooney’s throat while berating him: “You want oil? Here’s you’re oil!” (I’m paraphrasing here.) This will surely be a test of the addict’s denial mechanism. Will this be the bottoming out in which a life-changing turn-around commences for the addict? Will we enter into collective OA (Oil Anonymous)? Will this be our Chernobyl cum Berlin Wall moment?

As they say, denial ain’t a river in Egypt. It’s a big, fat ink blot on the region whose circular depression was created by an ancient meteor believed to have caused our last global extinction. Its legacy is the fuel that drives our entire economic system: decomposed dinosaur.

The pith* theory of advertising.

* Pithing is when you stick a needle in the brain of a live frog. The goal is to scramble its brain in order to immobilize it for dissection while it is still alive. When applied to advertising a paradox or insult is used like a needle to confuse and conquer unwilling media gawkers into immobile rage. In protest I won’t post a link.

This is an interesting ad that blurs the lines between self-reflexivity, DIY and marketing. You can click each element and it explains why it’s there. I think it works because it offers to teach something you may not know, all the while offering a way to further your curiosity. I’ve noticed that a lot new media has a very buttoned down, let’s hang out and chat kind of discourse. Does this mean we have reached the end of empire in which we are told what is good for us? Or is this just a more relaxed version?

I nice little feature on an inevitable corporate menace: Localwashing.

On Barnes & Noble (see graphic above):

Maybe you’ve heard of this cute little bookstore around the corner. It’s got a DIY-looking video blog with the tagline, “All bookselling is local.” Except when it isn’t.

(watch the videos in order)

Do you want to frak this car?

One of the key themes of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature is the loss of a cultural restraining ethic in our dominant global paradigm, one that limits “progress” and prohibits the over-exploitation of land. Up to the Renaissance it was commonly held in European cultures that it was sinful to plunder Earth. With the scientific and industrial revolutions, that ethic of restraint has become a heresy, in particular if it inhibits capitalism’s primary product, growth. As I write this, though, I see how “growth” is actually a gross misnomer because what “grows” is financialization, and hence disimbedding from the constraints of nature, while simultaneously diminishing the biosphere’s diversity and “budget of flexibility,” to put in Gregory Bateson‘s words, which makes ecosystems so resilient to disturbances. Bateson likened the situation to a tightrope walker’s balance pole getting increasingly smaller. We’re on the verge of whittling ours down to the nubs of our hands.

Given this context, we should be weary of popular buzzwords like “unleash.” From the Enlightenment perspective, unleashing the autonomous self on a global scale is a virtue, but from the view of a constraining ecological ethic, “unleashing” is akin to cutting loose the ego pitbull, which has been designed not to cooperate or participate in the cultural commons, but to terrify neighbors and to destroy a sense of community, best expressed by Margaret Thatcher, who said there is “no such thing as society, only individual men and women.” She added, “Economics are the method, but the object is to change the soul” (P. 23 from David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism (highly recommended!)).

Thus we come to Untamed Two, stand-ins for two new Mini Cooper models (two new *models*, get it?). This is a fairly clear example of the merger between culture and car industries in the current waive of branded entertainment. Gleaning the ad’s imagery and banal disco-pop soundtrack, the images at best a parody of the worst kind of Euro-trash bourgeois aesthetic, “aesthetic” being a kind word given the state of the world.

Part one’s mirror motif is reminiscent of a tale told by Borges. In it he refers to an old Chinese legend about an emperor’s battle against a race of specular beings from the mirror world who had previously lived side-by-side with humans. Upon losing the war with the Yellow Emperor they were banished back to the mirror world, and forced to imitate all our movements. The legend warns that one day the people inside the mirror will return, and we’ll know of their eminent arrival when we hear the clanking of their weapons from behind the mirror. I liken the mirror people to our fractured and shadowed unconsciousness, the disembodied observer self common to people who experience extreme trauma. In our collective Western psyche, with linear perspective and later the Industrial Revolution, we pushed away from our Earthen bodies as we increasingly mass mediated our lives, disembedding ourselves from a grounded and sacred relationship with the Gaia. The mirror world starts to replace the one we evolved in.

McLuhan writes of the Narcissus myth as an allegory for our amputated selves transported into this mirror world. Failing to feel anything in our own bodies, we look to the media to re-stimulate and reawaken our machinated corpses (see Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom and Dream for a great discussion of the transformation of our living bodies into corpses, machines, robots and now astronauts). The more we call upon media to awaken us, the more we turn ourselves over to the mediation of our very bodies so as to avoid feeling the pain of the world.

Which brings us to the next two installments of the Mini Cooper ads. In them we see quasi-David Lynch horror edits that jar the nerves, exemplifying how media evolve to make us feel (something), thereby satisfying the viewing public’s increasingly desensitized need for amped-up nerve stimulation, the clawing, animalistic growls an allusion–and nod even–to the repressed animal-being in all of us. Not surprisingly, it’s the “wild” woman–not the rational man who is to buy the car–who invokes in the male gaze a broken mirror of the ancient, “primitive” self. She smashes a pastoral scene with cows, an ironic image given that many believe that it was the domestication of animals and plants that initiated our separation from a holistic connection to the land and each other. So the deeper shadow of our long-lost carnal selves is there, but it’s so twisted and deformed, its benevolent and mutual aid nature has been mutilated beyond recognition.

Unless you pay attention.

Here is a print version:

There is major condemnation coming from all quarters calling the image “offensive.” Presumably it’s because 9/11 has a sacred aura that must not be tampered with– unless you are a politician trying to motivate a reluctant public to go to war. I realize that seeing the event trivialized in the ad is potentially traumatic to the viewing pubic. After I got mugged at gunpoint I felt any ad with pistol pointing at me was traumatizing, which made walking through Manhattan impossible. But if we are going to criticize the ad on these grounds, let’s at least be consistent. I know some critics of the ad were also critical of the Republicans for using 9/11 to run their campaigns on, but 9/11 has been so desacralized by mediation the claim that the event is beyond parody or artistic interpretation is no longer valid.

But let’s look at the message itself. I think it’s a valid point to juxtapose the tragedy of 9/11 with those caused by global climate change. The Tsunami, however, is a terrible example. It was the result of an earthquake. We could do far better by pointing to the number of lives destroyed by wacky weather, technology and human-made natural catastrophe. But more to the point, are we advocating social change for the environment to save human lives? Or is there a greater cause at stake, namely that the biosphere does not exist primarily for humans? It’s true that we often don’t take action unless there is a direct impact on our lives (that is, one that is visceral and clear), but shouldn’t we be advocating for a broader sense of justice, one for the planet and all its inhabitants?

On this point, I think the following image does a much better job (it reads, “For nature, everyday is 9/11″–go here for a larger version):

To be fair we are making metaphorical comparisons in which the situations are ultimately not analogous. Terrorism is a political tool targeted at other humans designed to “disrupt business as usual.” It’s a kind of media with very real, violent results. The destruction of the biosphere is less shocking because it is so pervasive and normal that it garners little attention. Is the Tsunami Earth terrorism against humans? Hardly! But Katrina? To say a hurricane has intentions is to move into a class of wingnuts like Pat Robertson, however we could say that Katrina was actually a human created disaster that revealed a structural form of state violence.

I suppose images of environmental destruction don’t garner equal outrage when compared to images of terrorism because the latter is a violation of our sacred trust in the stability of the system and state, whereas through the lens of technocratic media the environment has lost its sacredness, so much so that to call the biosphere sacred would relagate a commentator to the luny bin of public access TV or the Internet, far from the sane discourse of the evening news and trade papers.