Stories in Digital Media (SIDM) was a blog run by a few students and the professor Frieder Nake, part of the former Digital Media programme in the state of Bremen, Germany. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, the web and digital technology were advancing at an unprecedented pace in the social and artistic sphere. Developments were exciting, and we kept a log of some events and took time to reflect.

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Stuff that may be relevant for the Digital Media programme in Bremen.

Art & Copy

· Andre Hoffmann · in Culture Design Rant
Art & Copy is a cinematic documentary about advertisement. I would say - according to the trailer - it is one typical self-criticizing and at the same time self-adulating fast paced movie with the motivation of mystifying things more than they probably deserve to be. Maybe it's all of that not because it's just the trailer. Then again, you know what they say about trailers. Well, have a look for yourself.

6 Comments

  1. valderama
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism , culture pessimism?
  2. Andre
    Hi valderama, do you mean that those two words are the answer to the questions of the movie?
  3. valderama
    hey :) i just thought, that this movie has an anti-consumeristic attitude in general ... and then i was wondering, if this view on the problems of current capitalism is just again a pessimistic view or if it this actually changes people in a way which is maybe not good. i am unsure about ... but i definitely sympathize with this quote: "best things in the life are not things":)
  4. Andre
    Nice saying. And interesting interpretation. I think the role of advertisement is a tremendous one, and, which is quite common sense, at least in the USA, that there is too much advertisement. Advertisement is in a word: Manipulation: It wants you do things you actually don't want to do. And superficiality: it's not about consume in general, it's about what you consume. It provides you with a false identity. In that way I can absolutely sign the trailer. What I am afraid of is the nonchalance those polemic documentaries (I haven't seen Art&Copy yet, I mean movies starting with Michael Moore over Supersize Me to the last recent one I saw, Religulous). They all speak a language of entertainment, serving a relaxed and passive mind, in a very similar way to that of what they are criticizing. And I don't know if that leads to a valuable deliberation towards a certain topic instead of a polarization. I don't think so.
  5. valderama
    another issue of this type of documentaries is, that at times the borders between facts and fiction are blurry. for the sake of entertainment again, i guess. regarding ads: they are bad, because they manipulate. they are good, because we still can choose what to buy. no ads would mean no choice. sounds a bit "democratic"...? ps: i like the design-update for sidm!
  6. Andre
    "they are good, because we still can choose what to buy. no ads would mean no choice." Mh, that is a tough analogy and I don't know if I would say that, too. Would "no ads" mean that there aren't still ways of gathering information about some product you need? But I guess advertisement is a very natural part of a capitalistic culture. In other means, it's like the puffer at the market but only using mass media. Speaking of capitalism. The aforementioned Michael Moore's newest movie is called: "Capitalism: A Love Story". P.S.: Yeah, the design update was long due. I never was happy with the old one so I choose a very simple new one. There is still room for improvement though ;-)

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