Culture Jamming

shop_drop

I only manage to film the proof in three of the locations in the changing rooms. Aside from A&F, H&M, and AE in the Carousel Mall, I also dropped tags off in the Starbucks and J Michaels on Marshal Street.

This is the subvertisement of the Skyy advertisement that I completed earlier in the year.  Since it was uploaded to the wrong place, I’m re-uploading it.  To be honest, this advertisement seemed to dig its own grave it terms of critiquing itself.  I look at my version as putting the cherry on top, blatantly showing what it is saying.  I added the chain and shackle to the image.  I also tweaked the image so said revisions could fit, but that was about all that I did to the image.

I wanted to critique the vanity that some people in society have.  To do this I focused on cosmetic surgery, and the extremes that people are willing to go to change looks to fit what they think is attractive.  I needed a fairly accessible outlet to reach these types of people.  So I used celebrity magazines.  These magazines have several advertisements and stories of celebrities associated with cosmetic surgery.  I created my own advertisements using existing ones I have found on the internet to ‘make fun of’ and bash cosmetic surgery. I then took these ads and inserted them into the celebrity magazines as seamlessly as possible by undoing the staples in the magazine and inserting my ads.  It’s then stapled back up. Best case scenario, someone sees these ads and thinks ‘is that really what they’re advertising?’

If one is interested in continuing this project, email cnhenry@syr.edu for subvertisement files.

Shop Dropping American Apparel Tags.

Check out our dropping experience on the blog: American Approval.

Talia Daly and Will Sears

The Nintendo Wii is a widely innovated and popular video game console within the current day market, although the Wii has a major problem circling around it, which is the big piracy issue. Piracy has always been a problem in the electronic world, music and movies being the big two, but with video games a lot of consoles have put much effort into anti-piracy issues. The Xbox360 is fairly hard to hack into and Microsoft is constantly making updates to restrict hackers and the Playstation 3 is currently just impossible to hack into at all; but the Wii has it worst because it’s very easy to hack in order to play pirated games and homebrews, you don’t even need to open the console up.

With these piracy issues the Wii has, most big name developers don’t want to produce games for the system in fear that they won’t make any sales because their games can be so easily pirated. This issue results in a lot of “shovelware”, a term used to indicate any product of disappointingly low quality due to a lack of time and effort by the developers. These shovelware titles get bought because the casual costumer (generally being kids, older adults, or other consumers with few current technology skills and information) isn’t aware of how exactly to set up a hacked Wii, while the more “core” consumer is knowledgeable of these skills. To put all of this in general terms, casuals buy shovelware while cores buy more quality titles, but the cores know how to easily pirate any game while the casuals don’t, thus resulting in the shovelware being supported while the quality titles aren’t.

For this project I’m going to set up a boxed “game” that will give easy instructions on how to safely and quickly hack your Wii, so that literally anyone can do it. The game will come with a CD that has all of the programs and files you need and a booklet giving instructions on how to install these into your Wii. It will all be encased in a Wii box with custom box art so that it looks like a regularly distributed Wii game.

The intended “goal” of this project is to get the casual market into Wii piracy, therefore not supporting shovelware developers. In theory this will make Nintendo try to increase anti-piracy programming into the Wii so that it can’t be hacked, thus giving quality developers a more safer view on creating games for the Wii.

using manipulated images and posting them around syracuse city and syracuse university to bring out more immediate and “now” awarenss of ones surroundings and maybe even a trigger a motivation to do anything. anything at all. Also the perverse pieces to the stickers were meant  to disrupt any comfortable people or inflexible dogmas.

Recently a good friend of mine was fired from their job at an Exxon down the road from our house. He wasn’t too mad though, It was a pretty boring job. The most interesting part though, asside from the hot dogs never being replaced, was hearing all of the gossip about the company from other employees. Downsizing due to low sales, low sales due to high costs, high costs due to the search for oil and so forth.

My project was intended to attack ExxonMobil, in a subtle. I created two posters, seemingly in support of Exxon. However when you read the posters you will find that Exxon, to no surprise, is just another corporation deceiving you to support their product.

Excerpt from one poster:

“Thanks to valued customers like you, ExxonMobil celebrates it’s 30 year anniversary. Your supporthas directly impacted our ability to provide for the community. Without it, EM could not continue (technically nonrenewable) natural resources with duel. Every purchase you make goes towards drilling in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico.”

It puts the reader at fault with the company and makes them think about what harm they may be doing by adding to the problem.

Tagging the vaccuums

Local Mobile gas station

Video on YouTube: Device Democracy

http://www.devicedemocracy.com

My final project is an extension of my mid-term project – which involves labeling clothing items that the SU girl typically wears. I took it one step further so that not only a certain amount of shoppers will be aware of their own fitting into the “stereotype” of an SU sorority girl.

I went around to stencil the store fronts of places like Starbucks where they usually go to.

By going to the streets and stenciling shop fronts of places they usually go to, I make every shopper aware of their conformity.