| |||
| |||
| | | |
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
Hi, Jim, how's the Semiotics course going? Not so well, actually. The lecturer keeps marking my essays down. I'd take that as a sign, if I were you. Yeah, well, my dissertation needs to get a B or better if I'm going to pass the course with enough credits to get on to the Hong Kong Movie-making course. I've already passed Kung Fu. What's it about, then? Consumer electronics. Doesn't sound too promising. Aren't semiologists supposed to be interested in deconstructing and subverting the spectacular society of advertising and mass media, so they can all get jobs as ad agency planners if the revolution fails to materialise before they've lost concentration? About 43 seconds? Something like that, yes. Well, it's sort of about advertising. It's about those ads for consumer electronics that have been designed a bit... Like the iMac. Well, no, not like the iMac. You see Apple has actually been relatively restrained with the iMac. I'll give you an example: the Nokia 8210. The phone without the aerial? That's the one. Well, it's a very cute phone. Some goatee-stroking Finnish industrial designer has been given a relatively free hand to produce something that doesn't, for once, look like a black turd with a quiff. The problem is the company has decided it looks soooo good that only designery types will be interested. So? So all the adverts feature Prada Sport-clad, Wallpaper-reading Nordic gods and goddesses hanging around in minimal apartments (they're the kind of people who could never live in a flat) spouting pseudo Zen rhetoric. Uh... yeah... and your point is? Well, it's a kind of wish fulfilment on the part of the ad's art director (who you know lives in a damp flat in Kilburn), for a start, but moreover it deliberately mystifies the basic point of the product. It's just another phone, but in a different colour to black. And there's a Philips ad, too, for its cordless digital phones, where an almost exact replicant of the Nokia people is going on about how great it is that Philips now do DECT phones in blue or (ugh) cream. It's such a minimal insight into product design - maybe people would like something that doesn't stick out like a boil on Sadie Frost's bottom in their homes - that it needs to be deified into the realm of designer object. I can't help feeling you're going to fail the course, here. Ah, I have a secret weapon. You see, the absurd thing is that the material for creating all this pretty stuff in is plastic; and Barthes described plastic, in Mythologies, as being the real substance the alchemists were after: utterly mutable. Which makes it all the more baffling why we've spent the last 40 years in the thrall of black, beige and silver when we could have had puce, violet and magenta. So you're basing your attempt to get better than a B in Semiotics on a cribbed insight from a book every self-respecting post-modernist should have read before they were 15? Er, yes. You can't fail - I'll see you in the John Woo Masterclass. Anyway, have I shown you my 7110? Can I press the button? Sure. 'Tank, I need an exit, now!' | ||||||
16/02 16/03 16/04 16/05 16/06 16/07 16/08 16/09 16/10 16/11 16/12 16/13 16/14 16/15 16/16 16/17 16/18 16/20 16/21 16/22 16/23 16/24 16/25 | ||||||
| | | | | | |