Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Nostalgic Advertising in Defence of Object-Oriented Philosophy

Miniature BritArt stick-people queueing at the 'tilt-shifted' Tate Modern

The prolific, effervescent speculative-realist philosopher Graham Harman over at his blog, Object-Oriented Philosophy, notices (real pictures that look fake) the increasingly Baudrillardian prophesied phenomenon of image infantilization, in this instance the by-now viral CGI practice of 'tilt-shifting', or perspectivally converting ordinary actuality photos/films into child-like scale-model visualized playthings. Soon all images may look like this in our metastasized hyper-reality. Though Dominic at Poetics coincidentally provides an example (The Little Engine That Couldn't)of an earlier attempt at achieving the opposite affects - fake videos that look real - in the video for The Smith's Ask, like the KLF before them. From the sublime to the hyper-real ...

But, returning to the subject of this post's title, this advertisement for Kit Kat chocolate bars, from the 1990s, must be the best anti-correlationist, pro-speculative realism advert I've seen to date, the real of object integrity forever receding from our chronic ego-desire to capture and grasp it. I should imagine Mr Harman would appreciate the joke):



3 comments:

Dejan said...

I don't understand how you (or Dr. Harman) came to the conclusion that we're dealing with ''the infantilization of the imagesin'' in this instance?

Beckett said...

You never played with toy soldiers, Lego, R2D2, or erector sets when you were a child? Now's your CGI chance ...

"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness."

Dejan said...

hmmm

instead of a response I would refer you to Shaviro's critique of Baudrillard, it's right on target

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=564

for me the problem of legoization that it enforces an uniform representational code and is in this way an attempt to stifle childishness, to discipline it into commodified infantilism, of the not-enjoyable variety, not in the infantilism itself