Watching the promotional video for Envoy, a real/unreal digital service that claims to specialize in reanimating the Facebook profiles of deceased users, you hope that it’s a hoax. “Two certainties in life exist: You are born and you die,” says Envoy’s Max Doughherty. “We know this is fact, yet when a loved one passes it’s still very distressing.
Maybe you’ve heard, Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday. The People of Twitter told me so. Or at least, told me I should step away from my computer and sit back down in front of my television to watch a press conference. But the press conference didn’t air when they said it would, so I started losing interest and flipping channels, distracted long enough to miss half the President’s address. Though I knew the gist: Jihadist #1 was dead.
For decades cartoons have thrived in a strange, violent, and often Utopian unreality. Considering their distance from reality, it’s odd how cartoons have been used as teaching tools to warn against bad habits such as drug use, alcohol abuse, and — most commonly — smoking.
Work life at Google’s Mountain View campus, aka the Googleplex, has become something of a modern myth. The conditions and amenities are envied by the majority of cubicle drones who are left to languish in America’s dimly lit office parks and asbestos-ridden buildings.
Boredom and monogamy are two ideas ingrained like memories in our collective consciousness. Those who choose monogamy are often viewed as simple fools by a certain percentage of the population; while individuals who remain single for long stretches of time are often dismissed as lonely, sad, or incompatible.
It’s difficult to think about androids without sci-fi visions of melting plasticine faces revealing a metal skull full of circuits and wiring; or artificial skin bleeding milk-white fluid when cut with a knife. It’s what films like Terminator and Aliens have conditioned us to believe. The underlying theme is that of fear.
In his recent Ted Talk, photographer/street artist JR recounted his experiences working on art in impoverished, violence-ridden neighborhoods in countries such as Kenya and Brazil. While humor and wit are central to the artist’s charm, what seems to set him apart from his often-gimmicky, pop-art contemporaries (i.e., Banksy, Shepard Fairey, etc.) is a genuine empathy for the people living in the neighborhoods where he installs his work.
In Uppercut, the concept of violence as reality check is at the core. Gints Klimanis and his fellow fighters engage in 60-second garage-based warfare as a reminder, to themselves if no one else, that they are more than their work. It’s the pursuit of living life a little deeper, as Klimanis says toward the end of the film. For many of these men, the fights are as much a defining moment as writing code or engineering software.
In the Fast Food Wars of the 1970s and early 1980s, before Wendy’s Clara Peller and “Where’s The Beef” became a national phenomenon, it was a death match between McDonald’s and Burger King. With stiff competition from Ronald McDonald and his McDonaldland cohorts — Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, etc. — Burger King conceived a rival fantasy world dubbed the Burger King Kingdom.
Take one look at the man depicted in Twist’s “Corporate Pigs” piece and you see not only the power of graffiti, but also the potential. The notion that a random message left by an anonymous source can inspire or anger a public audience. It’s what I saw as a teenager, the idea that you could be a fuck-up or an introvert or a total asshole and still say what’s on your mind.