Saturday, December 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
more mundane moments
I've been out of action for a while. Here are a few more mundane moments from around my neighborhood. I find these kinds of everyday scenes and objects, ordinary as they are, to be thoroughly interesting. When we stop and look at them, they seem to tell stories. I wonder if Mark gets much handyman work from the ad.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
billboard photo essay number three: ephiphanies of consumer desire
The billboard's territorialization of public space for the cultivation of consumer desire rests on an increasingly pithy symbolic vernacular. The consumer is hailed as a savvy interpreter of the symbolic universe who is able to recognize and decode the barrage of images and text that circulates around us. We become putative members of consumer society via our capacity for aesthetic proficiency. We could say that we are no longer "mere" consumers but active producers of the very apparatuses that guarantee our integration into consumer culture in the first place. This billboard poster seems to suggest that a visit to the Mall of America is a cultural event akin to visiting
The epiphany here is the "realization that there is a sweet sale” at the Mall of America “on your day off." Hence, we find delectable personal reward if we realize that consuming can sweeten our leisure time (which is implied to be somehow empty otherwise, much like the sky that provides the backdrop for the poster).
One has epiphanies when encountering the profound. Are we being asked to contemplate an afternoon of trudging round the Mall of America as a profound activity?