Cultural Fungus

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2008-05-05T23:26:00.000+03:00

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Alarm & Emotion

2005-03-03T15:04:00.000+02:00

Design & Emotion "movement" is, probably, the most enthusiastic initiative for product design in our decade -a great accomplishment especially in such a scattered community of designers. The alarm-clock designs below are apparently influenced by such emotional concerns, even though they may not be directly in touch with the Design & Emotion Society.

Furthermore, it is interesting how the alarm-clock is a preferred subject in studies related to emotional design. My best guess is that, this is due to their potential in engaging an interaction with the user. Anyway, the examples below are maybe the best among such projects.

Link - Sfera Alarm Clock by Hayat Benchenaa & Garikoitz Iruretagoiena, as published in We-Make-Money-Not-Art
Link - Quattro Alarm Clock by Didier Hilhorst & Nicholas Zambetti, as published in We-Make-Money-Not-Art
Link - Official Press Releases

Garanti Bankasi on Fanzine Style

2005-02-28T11:33:00.000+02:00

Garanti Bankası, a major bank of Turkey, has had its new campaign: "Üniversiteli için Bankacılık" ["Banking for the University Student"] graphic-designed in "fanzin style". The mentioned style, largely appropriated by punk or anarchist photocopy fanzines as well as situationists, is based on a collage of various printed material and typewriting. Stripped of its politicalness, it lies naked, as yet another style, on the brochures and posters.

Link - Side 1/2 of the 3-page brochure (1280x910, .JPEG format, 426K) Link - Side 2/2 (1280x912, .JPEG format, 376K)

"Ideology tries to integrate even the most radical acts." - Doesn't this banking campaign seem to fulfill Situationists' expectations of -or observations regarding- the society?

Link - to the Situations Picturebook from where this picture was borrowed.

Personal Entry

2005-02-28T11:21:00.000+02:00

I have been striving to enter the new material I have in hand for a while, however internet connection in the campus was quite problematic during the week, and in the weekend I was gone snowboarding :D I plan to submit a number of entries in the following days; an entry for the file#1, another about "Duck&Cover" and the second file on do-it-yourself.

Video Games under Maoist Criticism

2005-02-21T11:45:00.001+02:00

Maoist International Movement's critique of video games accomplishes what should have been done much earlier: A leftist critique of video games. A number of very popular games such as Simcity, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Fallout, Tropico, Hearts of Iron are discussed within -sometimes a very strict- Maoist perspective -but most of the time uttering what we all have been observing as well. You may disagree with their observations, but still it is a great way to remind us of "politicalness of everyday life."

Link - For the website

It is important to note that while there are important statements like "... video games are not politically neutral" the discussion goes fanatically out of context at some instances such as; "Just like there are many roads to socialism, where some are better than others and some are false turns, the player in Fallout will discover ways to do much better or play the game from an entirely different perspective the second, third, and further times through the game."

Anyway, I admired some parodies, especially those about Red Alert:

"But the gameplay in Red Alert has been 'balanced' in such a way as to present caricatures of Soviet and Allied battle tactics. The Allies have standing naval power in the form of cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and cruisers while the Soviets only have subs to sneak around with. ... The Soviets have attack/patrol dogs while the Allies don't. The Soviets have giant flame turrets and big tesla coils that resemble an agressive bug-zapper whereas the Allies have more conventional machine gun and artillery turrets. ... And so on. Soviets can't even train medics to heal their troops."

Eventually, I guess it is worth a look (and most probably more).

Source: BoingBoing.net

FILE#1: Anarchist/Situationist Visuals

2005-02-18T16:05:00.000+02:00

Whether you support or not, anarchist underground is, indeed, a vivid spectacle. Claiming internet as a free environment for their political activism, these communities offer substantial material to "speak upon." In this regard, our first file will be concentrated upon this material. However, it is a very large field to cover; the file will stay open.

1. Political Grafitti

The site does not contain too many colorful visuals but hosts a good number of links, especially related to situationist/anarchist visual material, ranging from documentary photos on Spanish Revolution to hacking.

2. Out on the Street Posters

A Poster Collection dating from Jan 1991 up to-day including anti-Bush, anti-Clinton and anti-Bush-Jr. propaganda. Downloadable, and better yet, printable. Filetypes include jpg's, eps's (Adobe Illustrator) and pdf's (Adobe Acrobat).

Best part of the archive, I believe, is those posters and leaflets for the Washington DC Anti-Imperialist Action.

3. Stencil Revolution

Graffiti and stencil archive, together with a "how to make stencils" guide. Content is -most of the time- rather apolitical compared to the other links above.

Guerilla Parenting is one of those links. It is a great link for a number of political copyright-free downloadable stencils in .eps format. It says:

"Do your children RESPECT the hours of hard work that you invest in them? No! Children EXPLOIT THEIR PARENTS in much the same way that MCDONALDS CORPORATION exploits the poor and weak people of Canada's rainforests. It's time to TAKE MATTERS INTO YOUR OWN HANDS and force the LITTLE BASTARDS to behave properly. The time for calm exhortations and promises of extra cartoon time is over. Use our stencils to decorate your neighborhood with messages that will MAKE your kids BEHAVE and STOP treating the place like a GODDAMNED AMUSEMENT PARK."

4. Nothingness.org

A dedicated situationist portal and library, including very interesting picture-books on many subjects. Photo gallery from the Spanish Revolution -or rather; the Civil War as the authorities state- of 1936 is a very good one of these. The background goes like this:

"On the 19th of July 1936, revolution broke out in Spain. Workers took up weapons and went into the streets and defeated the military and the Guardia Civil in many places. The military had revolted the day before in an attempt to overthrow the young republic. The people who had been oppressed for centuries finally took things into their own hands and they wanted everything to change.

The land, the factories, the streets, everything for everyone. The churches were plundered, their contents burnt, the valuables taken to the committees and distributed, buildings and cars were seized and immediately covered with CNT and FAI (the anarchist trade-unions), the judges thrown out, newspapers taken over, posters put up to inform the ordinary people (many of whom were illiterate), factories and property distributed and prisoners freed. It was an enormous outburst of enthusiasm with one main idea: breaking with the past. No churches, bosses, military and guardias, but peasants and workers who were in control of their own lives."

I recommend the photos of cars modified into tanks; it brings up the question how far modification by the user of the product can go: both in terms of the original designer's intention/storyboard regarding the use of the car and also in terms of the political nature of the user's modifications on the original product. We are already familiar with the car-modification industry and Harley Davidson customizable vehicles.

But, wow, tanks are a different matter!

Estonian TV Ads

2005-02-17T21:07:00.000+02:00

This link is from BoingBoing . It includes a number of Estonian TV commercials from 80s -as video clips. It is striking how the contents are unrefined -not only regarding their low budgets, but also in terms how they integrate sexual content.

Link - For the collection.

The submitter of the link explains the reason for the nightmarish contents skillfully,

"It's interesting to look at these ads as the product of a society which was just then, all of a sudden, opening up to capitalism, advertising, and private media production. Countries where such systems have been in place for longer also manage to stick sex in everything, obliquely or otherwise. But in these early Eastern European television ads, it's all clumsy and creepy. Even the color gamut is scary -- Egipt's ads all have the drab pallette of a vivid, bad dream." - Xeni Jardin

And the following discussion is great:

"I'm old enough to remember most of those TV ads from the 80s, but too young to put them into any kind of perspective. For example this ad for "Penguin" icecream is rather pervers by todays standards but perhaps it was not so 15 years ago because we did not have "necessary" background from porn industry. What I mean was that less people were familiar with blowjobs because there were no magazines or movies etc freely available (they were being smuggled from Finland but still hard to find)." - Siim Teller

My personal opinion -if you care at all- is that the sexual references in these ads are most obvious. Check out the "perfume" advertisement for the most overt example. It seems that such extravagant sexuality is, indeed, the result of hasty liberalization, thus inexperience in dealing with private advertising and, actually, consumerism itself.

Furthermore, I had come across -semiotic- consumer society analyses by I-don't-remember-who (I'll check out some resources) that discussed implicit sexuality in even the most modest of ads: Sexuality is not peculiar to those countries, it is a 'natural' function of marketing exercises. So, Estonians' incompetence to properly amalgamate the ideological functions into the commercials should be the result of their inexperience with the buorgeois ways of seeing.

Hand-Painted Movie Posters

2005-02-16T16:13:00.000+02:00

Now, ladies and gentlemen, here is the very first entry for the Project: Cultural Fungus...

This one, is a -rather dull- link for a total of 8 low-res pictures of hand painted movie posters from Russia -as the title reads. It is funny how the posters DO NOT resemble the actual movie stars; but actually, I am curious about the sizes of these posters: The site contains no hints.
Link - For the above mentioned site.
Link - Another example for hand-painted posters from E-bay.

Poster hand-painting were, seemingly, an important medium for public announcements before other means, such as plotters or official promotion material, became economically viable. It is still in use, at least, in under-developed countries. In Turkey, for instance, meters-long portaits of Kemal Ataturk, hung in national holidays, are still hand-painted. This results in popular debates regarding how the hand-painted replicas DO NOT resemble the photos of Ataturk.

Source=DesignBoom

Come on in.

2005-02-15T15:10:00.000+02:00

Cultural Fungus is my personal project where I will gather links etc. related to visual culture studies. I am, myself, studying this field and I keep running into precious material in blogs, forums etc. As an archivist deep inside, I decided to share what ever I got in hand, mostly in the form of links and news, accompanied by my humble comments on the subject. Hopefully I will find some curious audience.

Who am I, actually? For those who do not know me personally, I am a research assistant, as well as a graduate student and some-time industrial designer, in an industrial design department in Turkey. I am politically left-oriented, and my personal comments on the subjects will tilt left-wards; besides, I don't believe in objectivity.

One last comment: My english is not flawless, I am sorry for any inconvenience. I plan to write Turkish translations of any news, unless I feel too lazy to (which, by the way, is how I feel most of the time). :)

I hope this will be a productive experience for me and you; my to-be-readers. ;)

EDIT: Upon a notice from my friend (alias: Metaar), I have decided that it has been politically incorrect that I did not introduced myself. I have recorded detailed information in my profile. Check it out.