Unseen is the way Doherty used to work when had to remain as inconspicuous as possible to the British military that kept a close watch on Northern Ireland.
Unseen are also the memories of violence, control and conflicts that are lurking in overcast landscapes and dark city corners. There’s always something in his images that seem to conceit and conspire. At least that’s what the viewer suspects because Doherty is a master of making them paranoid continue
Mysterious billboards have appeared in New York and San Francisco bearing the message that "Your data should belong to the NSA." As Gothamist astutely points out, it already does, regardless of any shoulds or should-nots. Animal New York did a little sleuthing and discovered this is some kind of teaser campaign for a company that will be revealed this week. A second billboard in New York reads, "The Internet should be regulated." ("For now, I am respecting the creative campaign and reserving comment on who the advertiser is," a Clear Channel rep told Animal.) So, two questions: Who's the advertiser? And don't they know needling the NSA is a bad idea? Photo via The Dusty Rebel.
If you're a federal employee with some time on your hands, Vibrators.com has something they'd like to put in those hands—for free!
That's right, the e-commerce hub that bills itself as "the easiest way to find the perfect vibrator" is currently giving away 200 free vibrators a day to help idle workers go from being furloughed to dil-doughed. And demand is brisk, with the first batch snatched up by midday today, though another 200 will be made available each day until the crisis ends. Just use the promo code "shutdown" to unlock the free offer, which the Vibrators.com crew admit is a bit of a security flaw: "Order one even though you are not a furloughed federal employee and we won't really know, but Karma will get you."
Unfortunately, the 200-vibrator limit has to be enforced because "more than that and it will slow down our warehouse and prevent timely delivery of our paying customers' orders." You can almost hear the frenzied commotion of the vibrator warehouse, where forklift drivers are working late into the night, loading a fleet of tractor trailers with crate after crate of the undulating orifice tinglers that are keeping America running.
Drawing on the work of a diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, Sensible Politics situates aesthetic forms within broader activist contexts and networks of circulation and in so doing offers critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest continue
A jokey-yet-serious campaign called Bribe the Senate, intended to get the U.S. Senate to at least discuss the idea of mandatory background checks on gun purchases, has hit a legal snag and its organizers are rethinking their approach—lest they end up in prison.
Four creatives at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners came up with the project (a personal one, not an agency endeavor), which was designed to raise money to offset donations from the gun lobby to six senators who could provide the swing votes to consider legislation on the topic. At midnight Thursday—100 days after the Senate voted to keep background checks from even being discussed—the campaign's website will count down to zero, at which point it was supposed to start collecting donations. Now, that won't happen.
"Honestly, we started this whole thing with the intent to fundraise for the bribes," says Simon Bruyn, one of the creatives. "But the lawyers were very adamant that this was go-to-jail illegal. Not just for us, but for anybody who donated. So we had to change our approach late in the game."
Instead, the site will simply direct tweets to the six senators and ask them to revisit their stance on the issue. Not so much as a bitcoin will change hands.
"We get it. Bribes are bad. You can't pay a politician to change their vote," says Emil Tiismann, another of the site's creators. "Next time we will form a proper political lobbying organization so that we can collect unlimited cash in order to have a meaningful political conversation with our elected officials where we strongly express our opinions."
Tiismann adds: "Please don't send us to jail for this. We'd hate to have to share a cell with a mentally ill killer who bought his murder weapon at a gun show without a background check."
Jacob Sempler and Andrew Livingston were the other two creatives who built the campaign. Check out its appeal video below.
Pulse-pounding thriller music and dramatic editing capture all the "excitement" of cable-access city-council broadcasts in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, in this tongue-in-cheek (but 100 percent real) promo. The commercial is nearing 80,000 YouTube views in a week. That's more than three times the town's population. High-impact scenes from the Monday-night broadcasts on Community Cable 9 include: a finger tapping a microphone to make sure it works; people writing on sheets of paper; pitchers of ice water sitting on tabletops; middle-aged, graying counselors entering the chamber and, ultimately, sitting down. The spot is so faux-intense, I kept expecting Peter Stormare to burst in … and pour himself a glass of water (though if he ever finds himself on this particular show, he should fire his agent). The highlight is Mayor Dan Curtis announcing that an additional $15,000 was made available to the local museum. Holy cow, what's next, a non-binding referendum on curbside recycling? Tune in Monday to find out, same Whitehorse City Council time, same Whitehorse City Council channel!
Here's something you don't see every day: a stripping politician. No, it's not Anthony Weiner. It's an ad for Represent.us, a new organization created late last year to fight the influence of money in politics. Josh Silver, the founder, is betting that a provocative ad—with a not-too-subtle metaphor for how politics works these days—can help him create a grassroots movement to pressure policymakers to enact sweeping reforms. "We need to get people's attention," he said. "We wanted an ad that cuts to the truisms."
This one may do it. It opens with an aide telling a white-haired, well-coiffed Senator, "We need these guys. They have deep pockets." Soon the Senator is stripped down to red-white-and-blue briefs, while people stuff wads of cash into his pants. Hackett Creative created the ad, offering to produce it pro bono at cost because he felt the problem of money in politics is "the most important in the nation," Randy Hackett told Silver. He has created advertising for brands including IBM, Johnson & Johnson and American Express and directed spots for Delta Airlines, ESPN and Motel 6. The ad for Represent.us was produced for less than $25,000. It will run online and move to Washington, D.C., cable next week.
The Reposition Matrix is an investigation into the military-industrial production and trading networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (also commonly referred to as Drones). The workshop aims to reterritorialise the drone as a physical, industrially-produced technology of war, and consequently explore how this affects our understanding of the covert drone campaigns in the Middle East continue
Under the Shadow of the Drone is a life-size depiction of a Reaper drone, one of a number of such weapons in service with US and UK forces. The Reaper is used for surveillance and bombing missions, in the declared war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the illegal wars of assassination taking place in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Such wars are made possible by the invisibility of drones to most people continue
AshleyMadison.com doesn't get political unless there's a sex scandal to exploit, so of course they jumped all over Mark Sanford. Wait, that came out wrong. The extramarital dating website is endorsing Sanford, the former governor now running for Congress, with a billboard in his home state of South Carolina that says "Next time use AshleyMadison.com to find your 'running mate.' " That's a reference to his "Appalachian Trail" excuse for why he went missing that time for six days. I don't see how AshleyMadison would have helped him since a) his other woman lived on another continent and he still got caught, and b) Sanford is kind of an idiot. But AshleyMadison's job is sleaze, not logic. Not to be outdone, Larry Flynt has also endorsed Sanford, hailing him as "America's great sex pioneer."
In Tarnac. Le chaos et la grâce, Joachim Olender explores a police and judicial blunder that hit France in November 2008 when a group of policemen wearing black balaclavas stormed into the small village of Tarnac and arrested a group of people who were later accused of being far-left terrorists plotting to overthrow the state continue
Illustrations of an alternative world where bespoke sports events replace traditional warfare as a means of solving seemingly chronic conflicts. Each sport is designed to reflect the cultural and geopolitical characteristics of the opposing sides, in this case North Korea vs South Korea + Japan + USA, and India vs Pakistan continue
The Ostkreuz agency was founded when what was probably the most important border in the history of Germany–the Berlin Wall–disappeared. Two decades later, the agency’s photographers set out on a search for today’s frontiers. Their pictures tell of discovering a state identity in South Sudan; they portray groups of indigenous peoples battling for their land in Canada and gay people in Palestine seeking exile in the enemy country of Israel. The focus is always on people: how do boundaries influence their everyday lives, and how do they shape their lives along those that surround them? continue
On Thursday i was in Turin and visited For President at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The timely, informative and a tad star-struck exhibition examines the American election campaigns, its calculated emotional moments, theatrical strategies and incestuous relationship with media. Part of the show is also looking at the interest Italy (and with it, the rest of Europe) is having for the American event, from a very brief article on page 3 of a daily newspaper in 1868 to the current front pages continue
Our society is governed by all sorts of systems and structures that organise and steer life. No system, however, whether political, judicial, economical, socio-cultural or spatial, can comprise life in its entirety. Every system has gaps, leaks and ambiguities.
The artists in the exhibition Mind the System, Find the Gap seek out these gaps. They set forth from this intermediate position to unveil, circumvent or criticise ruling systems and structures continue
One of the current interests of the Office involves an ‘overt research’ that attempts to build up an alternative and experimental knowledge source about the UK’s “Dark Places”, the labs and facilities of advanced technological development which are often (purposefully or not) concealed, secret or inaccessible to the public continue
The Cold Coast Archive project investigates and explores human beings’ efforts to preserve civilization and defy the inevitability of its demise. We look at the vault as a whole: its practical, political, historical and symbolic structure, its arctic location, as well as its infrastructure and cultural nuances, with all the research concentrated at this site, as a backdrop to explore the human relationship to time between now and eternity continue
There’s an exhibition featuring sci-fi, history, video games, homosexuality, soap operas, censorship and a powerful sense of humour at Cornerhouse in Manchester right now. The show is called Subversion and it questions and knocks around whatever assumption you might have about an homogenous ‘Arab world’, whatever image politicians and the media might have given you about its culture and identity continue
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