Obsessions : Day 040

Namely, where there exists fact, there also exists "red herrings"...
On television and in film, much of what we take for granted is removed for reasons of engaging the viewer's focus, and helping to present the director's vision in a single arc with minimal distraction.

With an on-demand, or interactive basis for a web puzzle, the over-arcing principle is that there must be a balance with one's expectations; namely, that it must blend in with reality in every imaginable way (to the untrained eye) but contain a relevance only to the initiated.

• What is entertaining and relevant?
• What is merely, entertainment?

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As we unroll new pieces, we observe how others are playing, and ask:
• How did they play last week?
• What are they saying?
• What do they expect?
• How do we best stay out of their way?
• What story are we telling?
• What's the bigger, over-arcing picture...a cohesive, or underlying theme defining how we present ourselves?

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On ALIAS, Jack Bristow is SD-6's principal Game Theorist. He consults in the hour of need when a strategy is possibly at risk of being undermined by hasty evaluation of the odds, or when a chief decision maker is potentially likely to underestimate the movements of the players.

The science of game theory is as much about mathematics as it is strategy, economy and negotiation. It's a tool for understanding how decisions affect each other.

When we set up the websites for Felicity, there was an intentional imbalance in the audience's understanding of reality. Namely they expected there to be a website about the show at http://www.felicity.com. The website would contain all sorts of acknowledgment of the show, its characters, storylines, and creators.

Of course, the way to establish that fiction is a pseudo reality, is to first deliver everybody's expectation of reality so they can get comfortable with it.

For ALIAS, I began by creating a brief that SD-6 was real, and actually based in the underground section of a bank in downtown LA, called Credit Dauphine. Since the bank was allegedly in full cooperation with SD-6, they would have a website, and that would look exactly like a bank's website. It would be a boring, whitepaper read.

The bank would also have a banner ad at the bottom, for a popular new search engine, called www.find-whatever.com. This link would be the beginning of the mouse hunt for information, as it would lead away from the bank's site, and take people to a website about Rambaldi, run by the official fellowship, "the followers of Rambaldi.org".

If people were to tamper with the urls, or attempt to hack their way deeper into other parts of the site, it would produce what i called the "hexstatic" effect, which was to disorient visitors by leading them to believe that they were being redirected to another web server, where an attendant named Alisha would check in with you, and ask you what you thought you were doing.

If people prompted Alisha long enough, or asked the right questions, she would spill information about next week's show in a way so that the visitor felt like they were in the know. And that was the reward.

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let’s never assume we don’t yet know our audience, or that if we demand less from them, you can f*** it up too.

Another angle is the influence of "impartial" thought in televised rhetoric. Apparently, most people are confused, lost, and increasingly wary of expressing a solid opinion, especially if it might make them look uninformed or shallow. But hey, who has time to read through and digest all this new media?

The spectacle flaunts the unattainable, first and foremost -- whatever you want most, it's always going to be the thing you cannot have – and it results in the hyped up marketing campaigns around any manufactured pop commodity. When was the last time Britney Spears made sense to you? Yes, she's wearing a pretty hot thong in that video. Does anyone actually believe that she's still a virgin? The tabloid press obviously sees the contradiction, since they've been trying to deflower and expose her personal life since she admitted such a thing publicly.

Everyone has an opinion on that one. Personally, I just think she was lying about her sexual history as part of an early, thinly thought-out response to the press making attacks upon her influencing young girls to go out and have sex. Trapped by the obvious, her "brain trust" began to help her position a lie, building a myth, and offering something more savory to print than the simple yes we all expected.

Hence, the contradictions of her public persona and her words (and private actions) are the subject of the spectacle, working at its most obvious level...offering no answers,only confusion in response to an audience hungry for empty calories.

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Beyond aesthetics, there's that 'correct' definition for anything that suggests that all other appropriations are kind of missing the point. Like Eno with Ambient music – not just a music that you can do other things in time to, but music that serves only its function, to be ambient.

With aesthetics, we also have commerce placing demands. Sometimes we swap the two; and we end up creating something that looks nice. We call it art, because it makes us feel nice about ourselves, it even makes us feel less empty, in light of The Spectacle which has commissioned it.

In the early nineties, post-modernism was still a topic of discussion, especially in light of typography coming out of the design colleges of the American Midwest...

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's more important to get people to be light. It works on so many more levels. Forget everything else I've said. It's really all about laughing, and about lightness.

And probably, even more so, about deliberately distinguishing actual laughter, from the kind of moment when people say things like "Too funny!!" but also forgets to laugh.

The importance of lightness in art.
Nay, lightness, without being slight.
Wegman, Emin, The Chapmans, Gilbert & George...There's a friendly intelligence in Wegman's work that precedes any assumptions one might make about his audience...8 or 80 years old, you still like dogs wearing clothes and with human body parts.

Posted by Eric Scott at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)