A fluorescent rabbit?
While footling around in the archives of we-make-money-not-art (a fantastic site I highly recommend) I came across this. It occurred to me that the current renaissance in traditional artistic
techniques might have its roots in a backlash against precisely this
sort of stuff, because, really, is Alba art? Or is she just a rabbit
that glows in the dark? Bizarre and trangressive, or just a relic of
what was state-of-the-art 6 years ago, but is now a pretty workaday
hack? Should we liken it to displaying a computer with purple wallpaper?
Or is it a desperate statement about our genetic heritage - our very
selves - under siege from technology?
At the same time, I've been reading an article about
neuromarketing, by a guy called Clive Thompson. Neuromarketing is
basically putting people in MRI scanners to determine their responses to
various brands. It seems a little post hoc to me; although I can see
that it may have some use in directing adverts, brands take a while to
develop and instant fixes like this don't seem to me to be offering
much. And as Chris points out in his article, we don't really know that
much about the brain; it's a bit of a stretch to infer that men who have
the same area of the brain stimulated by pictures of faces and of sexy
sports cars are therefore thinking that the front of the car looks like
a face. But anyway; this is all about our sense of self, too. The
techniques he describes are all about finding products we identify with,
and which stimulate the same areas of the brain which light up when we
think about ourselves, and what we want - in other words, when we
consult our own internal model of 'me'. Personally, I can't help
thinking that the staggering revelation they'll come up with is: sex
sells. But that aside, it's fascinating that our internal models of
ourselves can be identified so closely with products, isn't it? Just
goes to show how elastic they are; and how materialistic we've been
trained to be.
6 comments:
given that chimps can be shown to hoard shiny objects, I don't think we are "trained" to be materialistic :)
Yeah, we are. By magpies.
(which is a roundabout way of saying, I concede your valid point).
We discussed glow-in-the-dark bunny rabbits back when we were talking about glow-in-the-dark people on the halfbakery.
Advertising has to find ways to become both more interesting and more insidious. Product placement is all the rage, including in the business that affects me directly -- in game advertising.
For instance, an advertiser might be more interested in how long Alpo Dog Food was on the screen in MobilePet Dog then in pure CPM traffic.
Note, this message is a form of insidious product placement :)
Lime with a twist of bunny.
...a friend of mine saw this website the other day. Her reaction: "Jeez Matt, you do talk a lot of tosh." Today, I'm wiling to concede she might have a point ;)
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