consumerism

Animal Farm!

Posted on by Ajeet

So with Art of Persuasions documentary, Dom and myself basically split the work to a video each. We had to make one clip purely out of found footage and one out of stuff we filmed ourselves but with no interviews in either as a cool limitation to work with. I decided to make the found footage one cuz I dunno how to work a camera fo shit. But like I mentioned in my previous post we had the problem of trying to tackle a very large issue in a small frame of time (3minutes) which resulted in the overall idea changing two more times from the initial one.

My first attempt was simply too factual and wordy, which is precisely what I was trying to ebb away from, as I may or may not have mentioned in the past; explaining things to people isn’t how to convince them of anything. You need to somehow reach their inner feelings and desires.  With this initial idea we wanted to put propaganda in a place where it [although sinister] served a higher and greater purpose to maintain a stable society – as the alternative was complete and utter chaos. I acquired a vast cornucopia of knowledgeable clips and snippets to demonstrate the actuality that humanity was incapable of itself and required the leash, however the deeper I dug the more I found this to be the case only because humanity has been under the leash for so long in the first place. This research helped solidify some of my own world views which was great, but like any good apocalypse – in the original Greek sense of the word – brought more questions than before. If anything, my objective was now further from sight.

Knowing I had a long way to go, I made a contingency video which heavily featured themes from The Matrix, particularly the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the red and blue pill as an analogy to choosing between accepting the propaganda and to believe the lie or to realize that you’re just a cog in a system who has no say whatsoever in the direction of your life. But it was just too much of the Matrix in the end and I hated it for being so gross and cheap.

In the end I decided to make something I thought about when I was younger – a documentary, where the narrator talks about human beings the same way he would talk about animals in wildlife.

“This is a wild human mother in her natural habitat” – and you just stalk mothers in malls or wherever it is mothers spend their time. (pardon my ignorance, I thought Dubai was in India, I’m not perfect)

Gahah it’d be brilliant.

Recently I even saw something extremely close to it. An Aussie show called Bogan Hunters, where the hosts are blatantly capitalising on getting people to self proclaim their Boganism with or without them realising they’ve basically turned into circus animals for the entertainment of people higher social class. Heck the Bogans probably even watch it themselves believing they’ve attained a greater place in life by acting a fool on TV. Sigh.

anyway

I didn’t really explain why I thought this was appropriate to the theme of propaganda. You see in my research I’ve found that people are so well under control that we’re basically being shuffled around and made to do things to the same extent that livestock are, all without realising whats going on. It’s the greatest damned illusion ever blanketed over humanity, and if it’s not, it’s definitely up there. You know how you hear about those farms where nobody really gives a shit about the animals and treats them like they weren’t living beings (I don’t wanna post vids but you can find em if you look really fast)? Yeah thats what the people in control of your lives are probably like <<assumption>but a pretty strong one>. You’re just the oil for the cog in their machine of money.

You’re born and raised through a factory process, where you’re sorted by age, and shuffled down two potential paths of life |ARTS| and |SCIENCES| or Sir Ken Robinson puts it –

Since the arts don’t generally produce much wealth you’re immediately considered second rate, but regardless of which line of work you end up in, it’ll always be for someone elses benefit. You’ll be squeezed for every last bit of potential you have like chicks in a macerator. I say ‘you’re’ because if anybody reading this is most likely not in that wondrous “1%”. This affects and has to do with basically everybody. We’re so content with this complacency which might be fine if the situation merited it, but as a species that has such an immense capacity to learn, we seem to be going more and more backwards with each day that passes. I mean.. seriously.. Bogan Hunters.. how is that a thing.. religious beheadings and killing of civilians.. how is that still a thing? Civil war and discontent.. how is any of this still a fucking thing?
It just doesn’t make sense, I don’t think it’s possible for people to be this horrible if there wasn’t something or some force that desired or even required this kind of pain and unrest. It’s almost like the only reason people are horrible to each other, is so that they remember to cherish the times and appreciate when they are good to each other.  Like some kinda dualic Yin and Yang system we truly can’t seem to step out of. Does that mean we’re condemned to repeat mistakes? What’s the point of learning anything if you don’t adapt from the mistakes?

ANYWAY, I feel like I get so lost in these rants the point I try to make loses itself. THE POINT here is that I wanted to make a clip that would make people think for a moment that they are a part of a farm, not as farmer, but as farmed. What resulted, or rather was intended, is a clip, almost like an infomercial for the 1% to look into the lives of the 99% of their livestock. Three minutes, still isn’t enough, and I might like to expand further on this in bigger projects for greater reach, but I hope that at least I got some people in my own class to think about this. Even if only one person. Because the truth is, this is something nobody will want to accept or face. It’s like taking off the blindfold to see a meat cleaver, and I don’t have the solution, but I think it’s worth thinking and talking about, because “nothing strengthens authority so much as silence” – DaVinci.

 

EDIT: Here is the final vid I made. Hope you enjoy.

Kill it with a spoon!

Posted on by Ajeet

Creativity. What is creativity – what does it mean to be creative  –  why is it seen in such a low light? Well I suppose at its core, a creative person is someone who has the ability to create something new and unique. I always thought creation was something exclusive to Godlike people[because you know, supposedly ‘God(s) created life’], and that famous artists and musicians are all just born that way and everyone else kind of just had to just.. figure shit out on their own and will never be able to create anything of their own. Well over time I’ve learnt that this is about as substantial as unicorn poop. I realize that creativity is a like a garden, the more you tend to it, the more fruitful it becomes and before you know it, it starts to flourish on its own, but it also diminishes when you stop or don’t take care of it and just rely on being utilitarian – like a machine! – We can use it to overcome many problems in life, in fact that’s ideally what the power of creativity can wield; the ability to overcome anything that comes in our way. So why then is it something that we repress with great effort? How could such a fundamental skill be even remotely considered to have little value..

I think the problem lies closer to home than most people care to realize. It seems that the relentless plague of consumption that has affected our world today may have a part to play in the death of creativity. Trying to understand what a consumer is doesn’t need to be difficult; to consume is to expend or destroy something by using it – not unlike how we consume food. A consumer then is someone who partakes in consumption of something.

What does this has to do with creativity?

The consumption of it is what.

I’m ‘one of those people’ that believes that art should have no purpose other than itself. When art is created for the purpose of consumption and profit, it no longer holds artistic value and what results is artists turning into products which can be packaged for sale to the masses for a profit – the fact that its called the music “industry” is a pretty dead giveaway to their intent (of course I’ll explain either way right?) and that intent is not about creating new art, but rather to make as much profit as possible and fuck anyone who tries to get in the way. As long as people are buying into it, its a good enough reason to keep it going, and its sad to say that what has resulted is a breed of “artists” (decorated clowns) who have resorted to the lowest depths possible to maintain high sales (boring stuff I know but relevant nonetheless) and a society that is unable to see past this facade that they are brought to believe is art, as they’re too engrossed in consuming it, and the truth is – what they’re consuming is just another corporate product. By envoking in a consumer the desire to consume, the consumers themselves are consumed (Michael Dutton 1998). A whole lot of consumption going on here then, everybody just wants to eat – nom nom yum!

You might ask “Why is this a bad thing ‘hurr durr’?”

Well that should be fairly simple to answer

If you think about it again, creativity is about creation, and consumption is about destruction <–THIS

So who stands to benefit from it all? Surely our society would’ve collapsed into itself by now with everyone just om-noming their way through life. It stands to reason then that someone [or a group of someones] – ‘illerminaty oooh’ – has been feeding them to keep them alive for some sort of ends. I reckon it is possible that some super-creative someone devised a method of manipulation(or control) that could never be traced back and would result in complete control of the masses without their ever realizing it; if advertising has taught me anything, its that it doesn’t matter what the product is, they can make you want to buy it, because lets face it, most people don’t know jack shit about what they want from life and are constantly waiting to be told what to do [there are two kinds of people]. But like many creations that involve a lot of power, if anyone were to catch wind of an idea this great they probably would have done everything in their power to acquire it for themselves! <–THIS is actually pretty well reflected in the world today – like the race to space, or nuclear weapons(well…I guess this is the world of yesterday but the point is clear!!). The thought of having control over people – enticing stuff.

This kind of power as has been observed requires a certain kind of obedience or.. consent from people in where they are convinced that they need things that aren’t actually necessary, like…well ANY car at all; like why the fuck isn’t the world designed on awesome public transport [look beyond busses and trains ladies and gentlemen, if this had been developed from the beginning, public transport today could potentially be as personalized as you’d want it to be and you wouldn’t have work to death getting a car(cars have brought nothing but issues and problems to this world like congestion, pollution, social status, oil companies blablabla..)] but yes there are probably a kablamafajazillion examples and instances where you can see that these products have no real purpose in this world and if anything prove to be more questionable than anything; the best one is probably the amount of food produced in 2012 alone was more than the world had ever seen and was enough to feed every individual in the world, yet millions of people around the world still starved to death – and I’m faaaairly certain more-so that this is because it’s simply not profitable to just give food away.

Food Company: HA! No food for you!

If creativity is not profitable it is thwarted and dragged down to the annals of oblivion, and this is a system that only benefits people who are already in high places because it means that people will continue to consume their products while they consume the consumers – and the icing on the cake is they’re more likely not face new competition as they there are no opposing new and better ideas as a result of their murdering of creativity for profit.

That’s right, they murdered it for a buck =(

The capitalists of today remind me of a monarchy.

N.A.S.A. here isn’t the space station, rather a hip hop duo that made an album featuring some pretty amazing musical talents as well as some pretty awesome videos. Check out some of their stuff – iis goooooood.