This mock advertisement tackles the self-surveillance and branding present in image culture. I was interested by Hito Steyerl’s discussion around the contemporary desire to “camouflage” to ones surroundings. As our surroundings are largely augmented and hyper real, to camouflage is to essentially become a body of pixels or a walking video installation. When we become these hyper-real personas, we create brands for ourselves that can then be mined by corporations as marketing data. This piece is also concerned with the algorithms used to filter out inappropriate content over social media cites
This video advertises U-Flux, an ideology that conceals and normalizes ones behaviour to adhere to “desirable” image content; the piece darkly promotes the self as a conglomerate of reconfigured images from contemporary zeitgeist. The voice over is largely auto tuned, tonally edited or outsourced from vocalization programs, existing somewhere between personal and corporate branding vernacular.
The visual content of the video cuts between several rendered images as they deconstruct to show their artifice. All the rendered forms are mapped over with found advertisements: hyper real, desirable content. U-Flux starts off as very clean, precise and streamlined and then slowly diverts to green screens, more pixelated internet detritus and strange morphing shapes; this deconstruction critiques the conglomerate self and the surveying corporate eye. Ultimately, all of the rendered forms depicted in the video simplify and morph until they become screens to promote and manifest video content.
U-flux is symbolized by a rubber gloveto denote a clinical distancing mechanism and a massed produced layering over skin.
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