consumptive spectacle

Most of us have manipulated our lives into a fantasy of want rather than need. We have created a man-made world detached and dissociated from nature. According to Kalle Lasn in his book Culture Jam, we've gone from living in a natural world to living in a manufactured one. "For two million years our personalities and cultures were shaped by nature. The generations alive today -- who cannot recognize an edible mushroom in the forest or start a fire without matches -- are the first to have had their lives shaped almost entirely by the electronic mass media environment." (Lasn, p. 4) This mass media environment has established a culture that is "the meaning of an insufficiently meaningful world. [It] is the locus of the search for lost unity." (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p.130) In addition, this mass media environment is supported through a healthy dose of consumerism and the exchange of commodities. As Peter Lunenfeld quotes Karl Marx in his book Snap to Grid, "the production of commodities intrudes upon the social order because the human producers come into contact with each other only when they 'exchange their products, [and] the specific social character of each producers' labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange.'" (Lunenfeld, p.5) With expanding populations where more and more people need to make a living, the consumer culture becomes a means to survive through new professions such as graphic and electronic design to keep consumptive america alive. A growing number of commodities are designed and pushed into the culture to be consumed by an exponentially growing population. This leads me to the question, can successful design avoid this consumptive culture? Designers are just now beginning to ask this question in a way that will eventually effect the future of design.

I recently took a trip to Fry's electronics in Burbank, California. Entering the parking lot initiated a complete state of chaotic consumption. People with rolling baskets filled with stuff weaving through parked and moving cars. People in their cars were honking and cutting each other off to get the best parking space so they could gorge on the electronic feast inside. As I walked through the parking lot and into the front door, the volume of layered sounds increased as did the consumer vultures. Ahead of me was a display of a surround sound system including a flat screen double-the-duty television set blasting "The Best of Michael Jackson". To the left, was a mountain of point-of-purchase items sporting splashy, high energy graphics demanding the spectators to take them home. To the right, was a line the size of the Nile river winding around mountains of merchandise toward the purchase counter. As I wove through the store, merchandise seemed to fall off the shelf toward me in a media frenzy. "Buy this, buy that, you need this, your life will not be complete without this product, you will not be accepted into society without these worthless devices." On the ceiling, was a gigantic UFO hovering over a quarter of the Costco-sized store making sure that their "human" subjects were following orders; orders to succumb to the consumptive spectacle of American culture that we were smack in the middle of. It was as if I was trapped in the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" where everyone was floating around unaware of the trance they were in, helplessly embodied by the consumer spectacle.

The combination of retail environments, products, and marketing media of the Fry's Electronics experience isn't the only system that exuberates this spectacle. The internet is becoming equally spectacular. As I browse through what seems to be an endless amount of internet stores the onion skins of advertising, marketing messages, and promotional hype thickens as I dive deeper into each web site. For example, eBay, an online auctioning store, started out as a means for ordinary, everyday people to sell their used items. Through the years, not only have auctioneers discovered ways to make higher profits through "hyping" their products, but eBay discovered a way to increase their revenues through selling more and more advertising space throughout their cyberstore. Now, more people have discovered that a living can be made through eBay's service, establishing a new auctioneering profession, and eBay finds ways to increase their profits. The added marketing hype has made it harder to find the deals that eBay was once known for, creating an auctioneering culture that relies on the spectacle. As this phenomenon expands, so do the reactions of designers.

A french group featuring works by motion designers on Pleix.net, features a piece by Pride’s Paranoia expressing their observations and views on this consumeristic phenomenon. In their piece “Futureshock”, they combine video, graphics, and 3D technologies to create a cohesive argument supporting this thesis. The three minute piece starts out with a man riding a motorcycle through a media-rich city. The composition is filled with unnaturally saturated colors, buildings that look as if they were built out of billboards, technology paraphernalia raining from the sky, and natural landscapes such as fields smeared into a state of blur. The man on the motorcycle drives through the city and enters a supermarket. As he walks through the store, merchandise flies off the shelves towards him and sticks to his “consumer magnetism” until he is morphed into a combination of product and human. He painfully grows to the size of King Kong and roams the streets of the city. Entire cars on the street become weightless and stick to him adding to his new cyborg persona. The weight becomes too much for him to handle until he eventually collapses, falling in slow-motion toward the death of his cultural acceptance. He lands, dismembered, in the middle of the spectacle that has not changed.

In another piece featured on Pleix.net by Itsu titled “Plaid”, using the same technologies, they react to the fiscal end of consumptive behavior. The motion piece opens with a pan of a fantasy-world city where the buildings are constructed using forced-perspective and all notions of a natural environment are literally masked out and replaced by a pink and gray gradient. It quickly cuts to a board room in an office building where four artificial-looking employees are presenting their marketing findings on the state of the business. As they realize their profits are decreasing, they brainstorm ideas of how to grow their company, which results in hormone injections into their product (in this case, pigs) and forcing them to exponentially reproduce by adding a heightened sexual environment. The objective is to produce more products to sell resulting in higher profits and a successful business, which ultimately, supports a culture less natural. As in Marshall McLuhan’s thesis “the medium is the message”, they begin to take on the persona of the pigs in a demonic sexual frenzy between company and product, unable to distinguish reality through their own objectives. They become dissociation with their real lives. The piece ends with an employee walking a pink and gray silhouette of a pig in an artificial, forced-perspective city.

Gary Hill, in his video piece titled “Sites Recited”, creates a visceral experience by pulling the viewer in and out of focus revealing objects in the foreground and background at different depths, sizes, and clarity. The viewer doesn’t see the entirety of the composition until the very end, when, similar to the Situationist’s argument, everything comes into focus. Hill reacts to the over-saturation of choice and information while questioning human perception through seeing and through the self-consciousness of choice. Debord quotes Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind by saying that “self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-conscious; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’.” (Debord, p. 137) In his piece, the viewer is presented with what seems to be a variety of choices that come in and out of focus, but in the end, we are presented with the entirety of the objects. Similar to what Lasn states in Culture Jam, this “offers the illusion of unlimited choice, but in fact reduces the field of play to a choice of preselected experiences.” (Lasn, p. 104) Lasn’s “preselected experiences” argument leads this thesis to the idea of “active consumerism” as a way to redefine our consumptive culture through the future of design.