The bread from Krachenfels, which a large bakery chain in Germany, is that tasty, that never something is left. That is a problem for the ducks of course, because they don’t get the dry bread anymore. And yes, you shall not give your bread to the ducks because of several reasons, but the ducks don’t know that rule at all…
Toni Schmale, hafenperle II, from the series: fuhrpark. was das/der neue gefährt sein kann, 2013. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017, Photo: Jorit Aust
Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté, Face mask, 2016
Article 24 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights declares that Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
But does this still hold true? What remains of the values and achievement labour movements have fought so hard for since the Industrial Revolution? The growth of the service industry, of automation and of the white collar workforce liberated our bodies from the most physically exhausting exertions but does that mean that we feel a sense of body relief and comfort?
It turns out that, from a physiological point of view, sedentary activity is putting new strains and burdens on our bodies. News reports calling sitting ‘the new smoking’ abound. Employers are now increasingly responding to employees’ stress, loss of motivation, back problems and sick leaves with corporate wellness programs. Some offer wearable activity trackers to make work more fun, improve workers’ health, boost employee productivity or save money on health insurance costs. Others grant free gym membership. Or bananas.
As for rest and leisure, anyone with an internet connection is painfully aware that ‘urgent’ work emails, itches to update social media status and message from clients and colleagues are quietly nibbling away at our leisure time. Furthermore, the growing use of zero-hour contracts in the low wage sectors of the service and digital economy is imposing a new time discipline where the worker, informed often at short notice if their efforts are required, remains constantly on alert. Fortunately, we can still retreat in sleep. We might have less and less of it nowadays but it remains the last territory that capitalism hasn’t directly and completely conquered. Yet.
Visible Solutions, Clarity, 2010. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Hannah Black, Bodybuilding, 2015. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Hannah Black, Bodybuilding (excerpt, 2m46s), 2015
A new exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien is looking at the work of the future and the future of work. The show focuses particularly on the increasing demands that work is placing on our physiology and how these demands are met with (conscious or not) moments of bodily resistance. Bearing the energetic title Work it, feel it!, the show is part of the Vienna Biennale for art, design, and architecture which theme this year is Robots. Work. Our Future. The various exhibitions in the biennale explore innovation, speculation and the future. With a bit of scifi and a bit of healthy imagination. Work it, feel it! stands out from the other curatorial perspectives by taking a more critical, more oblique yet very pertinent approach that scales the theme back to the body of the worker. And while the show zooms in on the disciplining of the human body, it never loses sight of the broader picture and issues: the capitalist organization of work and its impact on all aspects of our life.
The exhibition focuses on the demands placed on the human body and its possibilities to act, as seen against the backdrop of an increasingly automated workplace. What are the mechanisms of discipline and control that have been applied to the mind, and above all to the body, to make it an efficient production tool and a pillar of consumerism?.
Work it, feel it! explores the role of artists in this context. Not only did artists pioneer new working models based on flexibility, freelancing and precariousness, they also constantly question systems of control, redefine spaces for agency and present possible alternatives and escape routes to this implacable drive for productivity that has become the ‘new normal.’
Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More, 2014/16
Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More, 2014/16. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More (intro)
Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More (still), 2015
The most thought-provoking work in the show for me was No More Sleep No More, Danilo Correale‘s compelling essay on the chronopolitics of sleep and wakefulness in postmodernity.
In 2014, Correale started a series of conversations with various experts on sleep: doctor David M. Rapoport, anthropologist Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, historian Roger Ekirch, sociologist Simon Williams, labour studies scholar Alan Derickson, geographer Murray Melbin, philosopher Alexei Penzin and feminist scholar Reena Patel.
The interview part of Correale’s installation is a 4 hour long study of the tensions between the unyielding urge to be productive and the impact that sleeplessness has on productivity but also on social life as well as physical and mental health.
I didn’t get to hear everything but the whole research behind the work is so fascinating that i’ve just ordered the book! While i was in Vienna, however, I did get to listen to Roger Ekirch. The historian believes that industrial capitalism’s relentless need for productivity has shaped our sleeping habits. Not only did we sleep more in the past but we also used to divide our sleep into two shifts. Then came the Industrial Revolution in Europe and stricter, less intuitive sleep/wake schedules were imposed on the workers.
No More Sleep No More suggests a very near future when productivity will not only encroach on every waking hour of the day, as it already does, but will also take control over our sleeping cycles.
As an ironic and somewhat cruel comment on the dictates of neo-liberal capitalism over our sleep patterns, the installation features a dreamy, scifi screening of hypnotizing moving fluids to be experienced, not sitting on the traditional gallery bench, but reclining on the most comfortable bed i’ve ever tried in my life.
Danilo Correale, Boosted (detail), 2014
Danilo Correale, Boosted, 2014. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Correale also explored alertness and the hyper-productive body through a series of silk scarves which patterns are inspired by the aggressive language of advertisements for energy drinks and invigorating ‘superfoods’. The fairly recent explosion in the energy drink & food market seems to respond and sustain the capitalistic call for 24/7 ebullience. According to its rhetoric, rest is a waste of time, aspiring to it is seen as some kind of moral flaw, a socially unacceptable blemish on productivity.
One of the scarves was covered in weapon patterns, implying that the future of our performances might not lay in maca and Red Bull but somewhere in the U.S. military’s ongoing sleep-reduction research program.
Shawn Maximo, Creeper Comforts (Specialty Multi), 2017. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Shawn Maximo, Creeper Comforts (Specialty Multi), 2017. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
At the back of the exhibition space is Shawn Maximo’s futuristic beauty store. It looks familiar, like a Sephora of the future, only that along with the usual eye shadow palettes and myriads of lipstick shades, you find body parts. Various shapes of butts, colours of eyeballs, hands in all possible skin tone hues, etc. The cosmetic store specializes in the optimisation of the appearances of both humans and robots.
We already know that in the future, human bodies in need of enhancement will have access to affordable biofabricated flesh, 3D printing prosthesis and other customizable body parts. Maybe in the future we will all be like Aimee Mullins, the double-amputee model and Paralympian, who collects set of legs and sees in each of them the possibility to acquire new powers, new function and a new identity. How about self-conscious robots? Maybe they will be as free (or as constrained) as we are to change their appearance in a bid to look fit, attractive, modern and ready to comply with any new work requirement.
Which made me wonder: will we want to look more like a super powerful and sleek piece of robotics in the future? Or will the robots strive to look slightly flawed and more ‘natural’?
Sidsel Meineche Hansen, The Manual Labour Series (detail), 2013
Sidsel Meineche Hansen, The Manual Labour Series, 2013
Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Manual Labour Series questions the hierarchy between manual labour and cognitive labour forms. The series, consisting of five woodcut prints and a laser-cut wooden plate, depicts the human autonomic nervous system (that’s the control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates functions such as the heart rate, digestion, pupillary response, urination, etc.) as well as hands injured by repetitive strain and affected by tendinitis.
To make the print series, the artist appropriated Edvard Munch’s woodcut printing technique and digitalised it by converting her handmade drawings into illustrator files, which were then laser-cut into the surface of the wood she used for the printing. The veins of the wood emphasize the craft, but also suggest a depiction of psychic spaces.
Depression, stress or nervousness are often interpreted as the collateral damages of our time and pressures at work. But what if they are signs (if not to say symptoms) of a resistance of the body—against its commodification and its exploitation by capitalism? The logic of profit strains the most intimate parts and particles of our bodies, from our emotions and our desires down to the tendons of our fingers. Everything can potentially create value, nothing escapes commodification. The whole body is mobilised and absorbed by this logic and the invasive technologies that support it. Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s work addresses the psychological and physical consequences of late capitalism, on a micro- and macro-political level, at home and at work, and seeks to locate points of resistance.
More images and works from the show:
Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté, Face mask #1, 2016
Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté, Upgrade (overall equipment), 2017. Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017, Photo: Jorit Aust
Installation view: Work it, feel it!, Kunsthalle Wien 2017. Photo: Jorit Aust
Louise Hervé and Chloe Maillet, Prosper Enfantins Performances, 2009
Work it, feel it!, curated by Anne Faucheret and associate curator Eva Meran, remains open at Kunsthalle Wien (Karlsplatz location) until 10 September 2017.
The exhibition is part of the Vienna Biennale for art, design, and architecture.
What the hell, NBC News? You tweet “The handshake has happened” but you don’t show it?
Anyone?
Thanks, CNN. (More on CNN in a moment.)
President Donald Trump loves to hurl his Twitter-ready insult at the New York Times: #failingnytimes.
But in the stock market, the New York Times Co. has been looking like a roaring success lately, particularly by the standards of the beleaguered newspaper industry. Since Trump won the presidency in November, the publisher’s share price has soared 57%. Online subscriptions are up, bigly — about 19% in the first quarter alone.
Scrutinizing the president turns out to be good business, at least for top national papers like the Times and the Washington Post. A different story is playing out for local publications, which are still suffering through the industry’s long decline and need to retain subscribers who are sympathetic to Trump. Consider McClatchy, which owns about 30 papers, including the Miami Herald. Its shares have plummeted 31% since Election Day. Subscriptions have barely budged.
Jawbone is liquidating, though its CEO is starting again with a company that moves out of the fitness-tracker business in favor of health-related products, an area that deeper-pocketed rivals also are entering.
Founded in 1999, Jawbone was once a darling of Silicon Valley and regarded as a pioneer in wearable technology. Yet the company missed payments, had manufacturing issues that led to refunds for its fitness device and cut employees, despite raising multiple rounds of funds over a span of more than a decade. The closely held company also struggled against bigger competition that moved into the wearables market.
Now Jawbone is going out of business and investors, including BlackRock and the Kuwait Investment Authority, are tallying losses from more than $900 million in equity and debt funding the fitness gear maker raised over the years.
Publicis LifeBrands has folded Evolvr, a Digitas Health spinoff, after approximately 3 years due to a reduction in spending by its only client. The move coincides with reductions affecting the larger Digitas Health organization across its North American offices.
Most of the employees who ran the unit—which shared an address with Digitas Health Philadelphia—returned to the latter operation, according to an agency spokesperson.
About three years ago, we pulled together a talented team of people—which we branded Evolvr—to service the multidisciplinary needs for one of our clients. After a successful, nearly three-year run, in Q1 2017, our client no longer required the same level of work, so the Evolvr brand was made inactive and the team was redeployed to Digitas Health, where they came from. While Evolvr is currently inactive, we reserve the opportunity to reactivate the team brand if a client needs a similar bespoke solution.
Because Publicis Health does not name any of its clients, we do not know at the moment which business Evolvr worked on or why, specifically, it became “inactive.”
The agency spokesperson said that most of Evolvr’s approximately 60 employees, including its creative and business leads, are now back at Digitas.
According to the parties who alerted us to the Evolvr change, Digitas Health organization has gone through at least one round of downsizing this year following the February promotion of Matt McNally to president and chief medical officer of the larger Publicis Health organization. The press release listed “oversight of Evolvr” among his new responsibilities.
The Publicis Health representative said these layoffs affected approximately 40 employees, or 8 percent of Digitas Health’s total staff “across North America.” The given reason for the changes was an effort “to best service current and near-term client needs.”
Publicis Groupe similarly went through a significant restructuring of its New York-based healthcare operations in early 2016, mashing Publicis Life Brands Medicus and Digitas Health LifeBrands into one organization. The move involved parting with an estimated 20-30 employees.
The Campbell Soup company has shifted creative responsibilities for its Chunky brand from BBDO to Y&R without a review. The latter shop had handled the account for just over 20 years.
Sports Business Daily first broke the news this morning, noting that the parent company had “quietly moved” the business. BBDO deferred to the client for comment.
“BBDO has been a valuable agency partner to Campbell for many years and has done great work with the Campbell’s ‘Made for Real Real Life’ campaign and the launch of our new brand, Well Yes!,” a client spokesperson said. “We recently made the decision to transition the Campbell’s Chunky soup business to BBDO to create breakthrough work that resonates with our consumer, leverages the equity of the NFL and inspires fearless creative thinking.”
The Campbell representative also praised Y&R’s “excellent work,” noting that the client will continue to work with them “in other parts of the business” like cookies and crackers brand Pepperidge Farm and adding, “We want to thank them for their longstanding support and contribution to our Chunky business for many years.”
“Campbell’s has made a strategic marketing decision to bring all their soup brands together and BBDO will be overseeing all aspects of their future initiatives,” wrote a Y&R spokesperson. “Y&R created a unique, meaningful and enduring position for the Chunky brand, beginning in 1996 with ‘The soup that fills you up right.’ That campaign was articulated through a powerful NFL partnership and included both actors and real-life moms of NFL players which resulted in tripling the size of their business. Our most recent campaign “Everyman All-Star League” also helped drive double-digit growth for the brand.”
The statement continued, “We are proud of everything we have done with Chunky’s over the years and wish Campbell’s continued success with their all their soup brands. We look forward to continuing to work with Campbell’s Pepperidge Farm brand to further grow their global baked snacks business.”
According to the Sports Business Daily report, BBDO’s work will closely follow the mothers and sons theme established by Y&R. The new campaign, set to break in August right before the new NFL season—will consist of a series of spots starring Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly and, presumably, their mothers.
Campbell is one of BBDO’s legacy clients as the agency has worked with the company in some form since the early 20th century, developing its iconic “M’m! M’m! Good” tagline.
Y&R picked up Chunky in a “suprise” 1996 move; the account had been with now-defunct Backer Spielvogel Bates or BSB. The larger Campbell company has made some other changes to its agency lineup in recent years, most notably sending prepared foods brands Prego, SpaghettiOs, Pace and Ready Meals to Anomaly in early 2016 (there had been no incumbent on these accounts).
Surprisingly, the spending totals for Chunky are significantly lower now than when Y&R won the business more than 20 years ago. At the time, AdAge estimates put the brand’s yearly budget at approximately $20 million. Now, Kantar Media’s latest numbers have Chunky spending just under $7 million on measured media in 2015 and $8.3 million in 2016.
MEC remains Campbell’s media agency of record.
-Paranoid launched this “Sleepwalking” spot for BMW (video above).
-The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors office is seeking a summary indictment against Dentsu Inc. for suspected labor violations regarding overtime violations related to the death of 24-year-old Matsui Takahashi in December 2015.
-Meredith Xcelerated Marketing (MXM) hired former Y&R North America CEO Tom Sebok as chief client officer.
-WeChat parent company Tencent appointed Droga5 as its first U.S. creative agency.
-Jack in the Box launched a media agency review after 15 years with Horizon Media (which will defend in the review).
-AW360 tackles “The Psychology Behind the Trump Effect on Marketing.”
-Final Cut added Eric Alexander-Hughes to its editorial roster.
-Venice-based production company Saville productions added Oscar-nominated documentary director Robert Kenner (Food Inc.) to its directorial roster.
-New York-based Washington Square Films added Carrie Stett to its directorial roster.
Stripe unveiled a partnership deal with two of China’s biggest digital payment services, giving the San Francisco-based startup access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers.
Businesses that use Stripe can now accept Alipay and WeChat as payment methods on their websites, according to a statement from Stripe. Stripe provides software that lets businesses accept payments online, and offers tools to help with data security, fraud prevention, accounting, and billing.
“By deepening our existing partnership with Alipay, we’re enabling businesses around the world to instantly access the once-impenetrable Chinese consumer market,” said John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe.
Jawbone just went belly up. Fitbit is on life support. The Quantified Self movement is busy measuring the last days of the fitness tracker fad; its 10,000 steps of fame are up.
I was sad to learn of Jawbone’s death, but not surprised. I took off my Up4 fitness tracker for the last time about three weeks ago. The clasp was annoying, and I left the charging cable in some hotel room and didn’t have the time to order one before my next business trip. Once you break your habit of logging, checking, charging, and integrating the information with your other apps, it’s over. The motivation you need to go back after a week off is beyond that of mere mortals. After two weeks — well, after two weeks, you’re starting from scratch.
Why consumer fitness trackers are nonsense
Jawbone is liquidating, though its CEO is starting again with a company that moves out of the fitness-tracker business in favor of health-related products, an area that deeper-pocketed rivals also are entering.
Founded in 1999, Jawbone was once a darling of Silicon Valley and regarded as a pioneer in wearable technology. Yet the company missed payments, had manufacturing issues that led to refunds for its fitness device and cut employees, despite raising multiple rounds of funds over a span of more than a decade. The closely held company also struggled against bigger competition that moved into the wearables market.
Now Jawbone is going out of business and investors, including BlackRock and the Kuwait Investment Authority, are tallying losses from more than $900 million in equity and debt funding the fitness gear maker raised over the years.
Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from 10 million smart TVs. The New Releases here ran on TV for the first time over the weekend. The Most Engaging ads are ranked by digital activity (including online views and social shares) over the past week.
Among the new releases, Roger Federer reminisces about his first Wimbledon title for Rolex (the official timekeeper of Wimbledon). Mattress marketer Casper says that “Perfect sleep changes people” in an ad that uses happy Muppet-like creatures to deliver customer testimonials. And an Axe ad asks a shirtless dude “Why are you touching your armpit?” (a line it’s deployed in at least one earlier ad with a different guy). Spoiler: He’s actually got a good reason.
Amazon may have invented it, but other retailers are cashing in on Prime Day. In advance of the shopping discount period Amazon christened Prime Day two years ago — falling on July 11 this year — eBay is rolling out a series of ads urging consumers to give its site a second look for the best deals. In one, Amazon Prime is clearly called out: A male newscaster looks distraught as a voiceover says, “You thought you had a prime deal, but did you check eBay?”
Suzy Deering, chief marketing officer for North America at San Jose, Calif.-based eBay, said the new spots function as a more value-driven push following the ecommerce company’s rebranding campaign, “Fill Your Cart With Color,” which debuted last month. The effort “fits relevantly into the time frame when consumers are looking for deals,” she said, noting that Prime Day “stimulates the market across the board during this week.”
EBay’s website was also throwing shade on Monday. “Their Prime Deal Is Our Everyday Deal,” read one banner.
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