D&AD

(don't) Join the Army

Have been doing lots of brainstorming on ideas for the brief, and Lindsay gave some good advice on researching TEQUILA\ , who set the brief for the army. Looking at their work, theres a lot of print media there, big photos with single images, nothing cluttered or too busy. This gave ideas for posters with a single iconic image.
The idea of using a computer game 3d model of a soldier is a promising direction to head in, it being accessible to the 16 year old market who the ads are targeting. These of course would be subverted - a maimed 3d soldier in a wheel chair, or perhaps lying immobile on the operating table in a field hospital, while a mud soaked surgeon amputates an arm etc, something ommited from Call of Duty 4 and the like. We also like the idea of doing an animated sequence, which could appear on the web splash page. I also wondered today about using the image of toy soldiers and putting them on crutches, or in court fighting to get compensation, but the computer game characters are more contempory and could have more impact with the yoof of today. I'll play with these ideas more to see where they take us.


I played around with the clone tool for a while today on this image after thinking about war cemeteries, and the countless lines of identical gaves. I just did a quick job to see if it would work. I quite liked the idea, theres something very poignant about war cemeteries. I remember walking around one in Kanchanaburi ,Thailand - built for all the British soldiers who died building the 'death railway' in WWII and finding it very moving.
I think the submitted work will have to be ironic and somehow lighthearted, theres so much disturbing and unpleasant imagery of the horrors of war, we don't want to make it to bleak. Not an easy task considering the subject matter and all the things I've been researching just now.

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

part 5

The Bauhaus was quite a highlight of the trip to Berlin, well worth a look to see more of the history and style of the movement. There was some great pictures and objects in the exhibition, the chess set and some of the pots and vases were very impressive (the prices of some contempory versions in the shop were also spectacular!). The graphic design of the posters can be seen in a great many things today, the bauhaus stle and influence has spread far and wide. The building itself was a little less impressive than i had imagined, but style had an interesting archecturial style.

The archecture in and around this area was also very impressive, seemingly each building following it's own design, making the whole district varied and diverse. Berlin had some outstanding buildings, the Reitstag being one highlight, though i never made it into the glass dome, something for my next trip.

Other highlights in Berlin include the trip to the famed Panorama Bar. It was a mission and a half to find, but this served to make it all the more rewarding an experience one wee were there.

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

part 4

Spy 'Vs' Spy was a somewhat odd talk by Sharon Daniels in the bilderberg room at Transmediale, who's work consisted of a flash website which gave a voice to women prisoners in the USA. Audio recordings of interviews with prisoners are accessible from the site, all of which were recorded clandestinely while in the guise of a legal representative of the women. Her aims seem to let people know of the conditions under which the prisoners live, while at the same time keep it under the radar to avoid any repercussions for herself and the women inmates. This talk was odd, because it came across as more of a statement of the American legal and political system then any to do with multimedia : other than the fact that the website she uses won a Webby. The same website that she couldn't seem to navigate around, but to be fair that was not all down to her, the talk was plagued with problems and was 40 minutes late starting for technical reasons. Sadly any message she tried to make was lost as the technical glitches continued until the talk descended into farce, video not playing, no audio, deafening audio, it was all to much. You'd have thought at a multimedia festival there would be a squadron of techies on hand to sort these things out and at least display a web page without too many problems.
There did seem to be a fair few technical problems at Transmediale, which was a little surprising for a world conference type event, though it wasn't all bad. On the whole, the festival was very impressive, showing a wide range of installations, films, lectures and performances and was a hugely beneficial trip for us - i wish i had as much stamina to attend more events, especially to see some of the other things going on at club transmediale in the night time.

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin

part 3

'Public Signatures' was an interesting series of films shown at Transmediale, and fitted well with the theme of Conspire. The first was of a topic familiar to me already, and of great intrest, called 'Culture Jamming' by David Schwertgen. His documentary showed a variety of different ways he and his peers have produced campaigns in reaction to corporate practice and advertising. Viral games, websites, public installations/information events are some of the ways they have tried to make their voices heard, as they make their comment on how big corporations ruthlessly take over public space, exploit workers, advertise in schools, promote greedy consummerism etc etc. While they realise that their work won't bring down the corporations, it's important that they raise awarness of these issues, for they can change public opinion to some degree; anything that tries to make the average consummer wake the fuck up from to whats going is a good thing. 'No Logo' by Naomi Klien is well worth a read for other information on some of these issues, as well as the Canadian film 'Corporation' from a few years back, and while your at it, the movie 'Zeitgeist' which is out at the moment are all worth a look to see things that the advertisers and other media usually omit from the public eye.

Another film in the series documented a street artist Mario Mentrup, who made grafitti and installations on the streets of Wuppertal in Germany, as well as using a power jet water-spray as a paintbrush to blast away built up grime on railway sidings and derelict buildings, a novel kind of negative grafitti. Bemused police looked on, not sure what to do as his team hung a huge photograph printed onto fabric under a bridge. He had an interesting twist on the usual grafitti artists work, doing imaginative things to public spaces.

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Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin
part 2
(the crap bits)

One lesson I think I learned from the Transmediale was never make assumptions.
My assumptions about what i thought the definition of music is, was challenged while listening to some of the musical performances at the festival. Sonic Wargame was one such event; it involved four teams, situated at four mixing desks at opposing corners of a room at Club Transmediale at the Maria am Ostbahnhof. each team would play music, and make votes based on how one of the other teams were playing. A chairman dude stood at a mixing desk in the center of the room, and controlled what music was played after voting, and probably did one or two other things that were indeterminable to me. Giant display screens at each end of the room graphically displayed the results of the voting, like some amphetamine tweaked election night news coverage. It all sounded quite good on paper, but I felt more than a little confused by the whole event, unsure what was really going on at any given moment, and at a loss to make any sense of the barrage of feedback and noise assaulting my ears. The guys behind the decks seemed to be getting well into it though, one of the pair staring intently into a laptop, and making furtive glances at the display board and dude at the mixing desk, while the DJs bobbed now and again at the wheels of steel, grinning and giving winks of approval to the other teams.
I looked around the crowd, and saw that the confusion I felt was mirrored in the faces of some of the others, who looked as ill at ease with the 'music' as I was. I began to feel like there was a private joke going on between the DJs, with none of the crowd privy to the funny gags the musicians were telling behind their hands. I began to wonder what it would sound like if the DJs had some quality choons to play with, some blinding cuts and deep funky rhythms - four musical maestros banging out some twisted music, and couldn't help but feel they'd do better than this non-music exploration i was hearing.
On to the next room, were the feedback sound had been fuel injected, the sound a cross between audio computer data emanating from a ZX81 cassette player locked onto the highest volume, and a television set with the aerial unplugged, being fed into a industrial food blender. Which nobody has turned off. I tried to overcome the knee-jerk reaction of it all being avant garde arty bollocks, and really give it a proper listen, but it did no good, the magic was lost on me and I had to gave in. It's a shame, and I like to think I wasn't being prejudiced - I've heard much more inspiring music at club nights and festivals, where there are also often many visual installations and multimedia trickery, that were just as experimental and far less alienating to the crowd than these performances.



The other assumption I learned to challenge in Berlin was even if you believe your camera is set to record everything in lossless raw format, and not crappy jpeg, always check, and double check. It wasn't till I returned home and plugged my faithful camera into the computer, that I realised I hadn't changed the camera back from the one and only time I've ever shot in jpeg. So all 460 shots of Berlin captured digitally are lossy compressed quality, and in a nutshell- pants. I've got a couple of rolls oldskool film to be processed, so mebbe I've managed to get a few decent shots somewhere. I was a bit gutted at first, but I realised I've got even more excuse to go back to Berlin now, so roll on the summer so I can go shooting there again.





next post some more positive and cool Berlin highlights

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Transmediale '08 - Berlin

Transmediale '08 'Conspire'- Berlin
part 1

It's difficult to know where to start with this first blog after returning from the Transmediale festival in Berlin. There was so much to take in this last week or so, and now I'm back and turning my attention to the current briefs, I'm still trying to make sense of vast array of sights and sounds I've just experienced.

There were some very interesting conferences and seminars at the festival, including 'greying the commons' which discussed copyright and intellectual property issues. One of the participants asked anyone to raise their hand if they had NOT illegally downloaded any copyrighted material in the last month, and of the 300/400 people in the room, around 3 people put their hand up. All current measures to stop the flow of copyrighted material over the Internet are obviously not working. Various methods to address the issue, such as prosecution and denial of service policies, to filtering bandwidth and the use of advertiser sponsored legal downloaded have done little to stem the flow of file sharing over the web, and a new model is still needed. There's an ever growing number of artists releasing their work independently from the usual publishers and distributors which have dominated the business for so long, and the plummeting cost of equipment such as projectors has also seen the development of micro cinemas showing films away from the influence of the major cinema corporations. These have grown from a more community driven approach, with a wikiness that many agree is the fundamental to the true nature of the Internet, and one which must be encouraged and developed if the web is to survive and serve any usefully purpose in the future.

'When Your Strange' consisted of a series films and animations, highlights including a movie shot on hand held cameras, a documentary style piece highlighting the pointless of a military border control post. The boredom and banality of life for the young guys during their stint of national service was distinct, as they senselessly 'defending' their country against nothing and no-one, as they idly pass the time to when their posting finishes and they can return to their normal life after military service has finished.
Another screening was an animated piece concerning identity and one's sense of self, as well as US immigration policy. The experiences of several people of different nationalities were taken form anonymous interviews, and set to animations of avatars, which were crudely drawn, or characters from MMOGs. The voices detailed the ordeal they face at customs, as they go through the lengthy process while US officials try to find out about them and discover their intentions. As one of the people mentioned 'your describing what you mean to them, not what you mean to you..... your face belonging to it's heritage, not to the individual'

continued later.........

research for d&ad proj

d&ad student awards project

After looking at the briefs for this year's d&ad awards, i was disappointed with the choices on offer. Last years briefs covered more humanitarian and ecological themes, a marked contrast from the big advertising briefs included this time around.
After seeing the army recruitment brief, i really began to wonder what was going on there at d&ad (can't help thinking that looks like it's written 'DEAD', instead 'D&AD when i catch it out the corner of my eye), and i began flirting with the idea of making an anti-war promotional campaign, making a poster advertising some of the experiences that are usually omitted from army recruitment ads. Just a few things like statistics on wounded and maimed soldiers, or those suffering from P.S.T.D, and the lack of care and compensation on returning, or things like the gross misuse of public funds, for illegal wars searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, while and various other evils perpetrated in the name of king and country.
After Andreas mentioned he was thinking of something similar, we decided to team up and see if it could be done in a way that fulfilled the demands brief, while at the same time 'getting away with murder' and making something that totally opposed what the brief really wanted - to recruit more cannon fodder into the war machine - a machine which is getting away with murder every day in Iraq. Some great words of encouragement form Micheál then kick started the research with renewed enthusiasm. Doing this project in a subversive way also is relevent in relation to culture jamming theory explored in the Transmediale festival we recently attended in sunny Berlin.

It soon became apparent that there was so many controversial issues that could be covered with this project, that some clears limitations were needed. It also was pretty soon obvious that it was going to tough going, some disturbing figures and statistics soon reared their ugly heads, as well as some sickening websites. One had many images graphically portraying injured, maimed and dead Iraqi children and babies by coalition forces, which I had to immediately close down before I threw up over the monitor.(i didn't include it in the list of links below)

Three main ideas were initially explored, to help concentrate research and idea developement.
1 - Tech war - focusing on surveillance, spying, internet tracking, covert-ops etc, weapons developement,
2 - money theme - to cover massive military spending, lack of compensation for injury/trauma victims, lack of kit for soldiers etc
3 - skill swap - transfereable skills- thugs/cannon fodder, pizza delivery/nuclear arms transportation etc, G.P doctors/M*A*S*H style field doctors.

Various themes were aslo discussed, different styles/look and feel to be explored further. These included
1 - computer game 3D models -except the soldiers are in wheelchairs, or maimed/traumatised
2 - military style - parody of army ad campaign, fatigues, write your name on bullet application form
3 - soviet/german WW2 propaganda poster style - bauhaus style iconic imagery
4 - bling 'money asthetic' - piles of misspent cash etc.
5 - newspaper style - bug headlines, news reports of atrocities etc.

Here is a quick list of initial links in no particular order, for further research later on.

troops refusing to fight

uk taliban training camps

gulf war return medals

families speak out against war

combat stress

soldiers beat iraqi teenagers

support group for war veterans

iraq body count

list of news reports about army compensation

11,000 uk soldiers desert from iraq war

more soldiers quit than are recruited

25% TA soldiers, 19% regular soldiers suffer from PTSD

army recruitment campaigns misleading

PTSD suffers denied help

army target '7 year olds' in ad campaign

amnesty international report on child recruitment


more to follow, there are lots of cans of worms around here, and I can't open them all at once.

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