D&AD AWARDS!

The D&AD briefs are like a tight pair of boxers on a summers day; they sound welcoming but just don't feel right. It occurred to me that this award masquerade is the perfect excuse for companies and corporations to employ thousands of students around the country for unpaid work and ideas. They're using our young, innovative minds as a free think tank, veiled under the guise of a national design competition, with prizes and respect as the incentives to do big brands dirty work. Well i will be no such spin doctor, im only pushing personal propaganda. Unfortunately i doubt the judges will be appreciate this antipreneurial approach, still victory is not only defined by monetary value, Persian warriors fought for pride, as will i!

After watching David Schwertgen's culture jamming documentary at Transmediale i was left with a rather romanticized notion of guerilla communication, much as i was a year ago when i discovered Adbusters. However now im well aware that Adbusters is pure hypocrisy and culture jamming is contradictory. It comments on the abuse of semiotics by large corporations, that are then projected onto the public, but it does little to significantly or permanently change the situation. Other than enlighten the everyday citizen to the paradoxical predicament, it really just adds fuel to the iconographic fire. But! Better to raise awareness and acknowledge the issue than ignore it and remain oblivious.

All this talk on the subversion of signs instinctively made me think about our current state of semantic dependent reality. We all live lives saturated by signs, symbols, imagery and metaphors, that together equate a world of reproduced emotions and represented experiences. Is our reality simulated to the extent of the fourth order of simulacra? Are we blind to the Matrix? Have we fallen down Alice's rabbit hole? Are we completely lost in Baudrillard's Hyperreality?!

With these ideas in mind, i wanted to tackle the MTV brief, taking a subversive angle to the given credentials. "MTV is a virus that invades spaces, disrupting, corrupting and mutating them." Brilliant! MTV is an STD! MTV is an entity, with 79 channels infesting over 167 countries in 23 languages, for 25 years. In the 80's it defined Generation X, now it describes itself as "the biggest youth media brand in the world" and is a culture in its own right. A culture worth jamming. "The environment that you choose for your virus to invade must be relevant to MTV's core audience, namely the young at heart who have a rebellious streak and like to shake thinks up." A quick guestimate would mark at least 50% of MTV's target market at having direct contact with a sexually transmitted disease; there's nothing more reckless than not using a condom, and nothing shakes things up like telling your latest conquest that they have chlamydia. Ahhhh yes, the infectious nature of televised rebellion. How will you broadcast your revolution?