| |
|
Yeah. I have, and I agree.
The Cloudmakers were a web group that sprang up around the weird internet murder mystery that was the PR for the movie A.I.
It's sort of similar to what Gibson was doing in the book, except everyone knew it was just a P.R. stunt. The footage, in its anonymity, opened itself up to authorial dissection in a way that the A.I. stuff didn't, and I think its purposelessness was part of what made it so attractive.
Here's something from a Q & A with Gibson:
Q: Hubertus Bigend, the marketing guru in the book, describes the footage as "the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever." To what extent is marketing now purely about buzz, and only incidentally about product, or not at all?
A: The energy that goes into making the trailer for a feature film is genuinely frightening, but I think most consumers have developed an inbred resistance to sizzle-no-steak marketing. You might get them through the door, but you'll have a harder time keeping them there.
Q: The way that the footage attracts attention on the Internet is by making apparently random and nonsequential appearances, yet the randomness and unpredictability is a big part of what actually draws people's attention to it. Do you think we'll see more marketing efforts, or maybe political campaigns, take this tack?
A: I was trying to imagine a product that was, in a sense, The Anti-Product. I'm not entirely sure such a product could actually exist. The closest thing I can think of was how bohemias used to incubate - back when it was still possible to have a bohemia. We can't, now, because the mechanism of commodification harvests them too early, before they're ripe.
Q: The nature of the footage is ambiguous and enigmatic, with very few clues as to what is actually happening, or to a particular place or time. It's something that people are able to project a lot of meaning onto, yet it affects them strongly. Do you think this is an increasingly common feature of cultural products of all kinds?
A: I think I was trying to explorer how new media may differ from old media. Old media (broadcast television, say) was hierarchical, top-down, and randomness of content was minimized.
I think that the depth of the 'footage' model comes from its randomness, its unattribution, and its lack of brand-tag. It's like Reclaiming Public Spaces - there is something incredibly powerful about someone who put that much obvious effort into their work, and didn't sign it, who isn't asking for anything from the audience except attention, and even that only in the most private sense. The Footage model is something that comes in under our radar, because it doesn't trigger any of the Religion/Business filters we have. You don't know if they're trying to sell you something, sell you on something, or convert you to something.
... |
|
|
