Ad Busters Magazine
Nov/Dec 2008 #80 Vol: 16:6
Freedom from Want
In this magazine, the following articles caught my attention and decided to interpret them.
Hipsters (a 1980’s US Counter culture)
According to www.princeton.edu, a Hipster is someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle. These hipsters grew out of a generation of rebellion and oppression (possibly carried forward from the 1960’s hippie generation) and became a resilient feature of the late 19th century. It is safe to say that the hipsters believed in revolution as the only redemption and carried out many a protests and rallies as a way to fight for justice. Every activist had the following items (props) which were symbolic in a way. They were:
• Cultural bible (newspapers, magazine etc)
• Flag
• Footwear
• Media Literacy Kit
• Megaphone
• Art
The time has come for a radical shift in priorities. We are now faced with some of the most daunting global challenges in human history. These are real targets, worthy of our problem-solving skills, ripe for our intervention. Yet, those who have the vision to rise above national and political boundaries still have no symbol to rally under. Through my film, I want to create these symbols, using set design and prop construction as a medium. My main aim is to use these props as words to narrate my story.
Key Word – Abstraction
What is Abstraction?
• Pure form?
• Hue of infinity?
• Glimpse into spiritual structure of nature itself?
• Loss of empathy?
• Fear of death?
• Or just a virus embedded in the Western mind?
These pointers merely define what an abstraction could be. It is still an ambiguous term that changes subject to context. But this can be said about almost anything these days. Contextual symbolism is a topic that many have touched upon, but not many have fully explored. I want to try and make abstraction a means to express deeper issues through my project.
The Planetary Endgame:
• Fever
• Urban Mining
• Organ sale
• Trickster capitalism
• Indifference
• Betrayal
• Decadence
In the future, men will wear T-shirts displaying a picture of their cocks and salary. Women will come in twos, for the monogamous woman will have long been bred out of nature in favour of the ménage a trois kind, so that finally, manly hunters can indulge in Miller-like fantasies and proudly gather their 15 seconds of commercialised ejaculation.
Light from stars will shine through atmospheric cutouts of corporate slogans, beaming onto Earth great adverts from the sky. Metal will erect into the clouds. You will stroke the building, riding it floor to floor, inserting yourself completely. You will let it warm you and feed you, nourishing insulation, fuck you mother.
Serial TV will be wired throughout your skull, and you will shut your eyes to internally display the good old pastime for your vicarious mind. Everything will exist outside ourselves, and though there will be means to everything, these means will be owned and assumed. As flies stuck in the web, we will be born as we are caught, our dreams the last measure of freedom we would have sought.
Life will be an ant farm. Numbers will bleed from the sky. Philosophy splashed with rhetoric and rationalism, churchmongers choking on faith pills.
Music will be reduced to one simple tone, perfectly balanced, the ultimate hook, impossible to forger and intrinsically unchallengeable.
Children will virtually kill each other, virtually.
Politicians will set up lemonade stands.
Oceans will be drained for real estate and land owners will display souvenirs of rusty coke cans found littered in their sand yards. Pornography will ascend to glamorous photos of shiny cars and you will jerk off to such aspirations.
Yin and Yang will go to war. Physically defective people will be quarantined to parks where families vacation to feel better about functionality. There will be no place for error. And here now, I sit around perplexed, a stale pesticide. In the past, I was a poet, full of diction and intellectual jargon in love with wordy ideas and mesmerising language, verbose for the sake of…
I hardly try anymore. In the future, I never existed.
- Steven Morgan
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