I'm not required to blog about this one, but I will anyway if for whatever reason I miss anything when I get called up to “articulate [my] own goals for the image [I] create[d]”. Here’s the finished product—no point in posting the original, not in this case at least:
Basically I took the H-Bomb Image and added to it some jargon in the visual style of Barbara Kruger. In case you are more of a Mac person, the text translates to a series of keyboard shortcuts that are shared by most PC applications. In order, they translate to Select All, Delete, Save, and Quit. This (and, of course, knowledge of Barbara Kruger’s work and the ability to recognize the image as that of an H-bomb, both of which everyone in this course is familiar with) is all that’s necessary to begin interpreting my work. The rest could all hopefully be inferred by the viewer; so take a moment to overanalyze my image real quick like we’ve all had to overanalyze various texts in high school English class because I’m about to spoil it all as soon as I finish typing this sentence right about...now!
First off, I hoped my viewers could make the connection between the PC application commands and what a weapon of mass destruction does—that is, Select All and Delete. Once they’ve figured out that the first two steps apply to both PCs and real life, they would move on to the last two steps. This part’s a little trickier, as they’d have to figure out that once one saves and quits, he can no longer undo.
[This was a concept I chose to not state outright, as I felt that would give too much away. I also considered adding a fifth block of text with the ctrl+z Undo command (or even f12 for Photoshop’s Revert command) crossed out, but I don’t remember seeing any Kruger images with crossed-out text and did not want to deviate from her visual style.]
After figuring this out, they’d begin to ponder the results of creating and detonating weapons of mass destruction. If I were to ctrl+a, del, ctrl+s, and alt+f4 right now, I’d effectively lose the entire blog post I’ve worked on so far as I am typing all of this in Word. Not only that, but no matter how much time I could try and spend retyping everything, the reproduction just wouldn’t be the same—I’d forget some ideas, or at the very least the wording would change slightly. This is true for WMDs as well. You could nuke even an uninhabited area and millions of man-hours later you still would not have reverted it to its original state. This lack of undo also applies to the world as a whole: since the development of nuclear weapons, the planet could be destroyed with the push of a button, and this is an irreversible fact whose consequences we have to deal with for the rest of our lives.
A few more things to think about:
1. The blocks of text are all lined up and numbered. This structure hints at a list of instructions, or in this case, a recipe for disaster.
2. The irony of how something technical like computer jargon could apply to something so human like the potential deaths of millions.
3. The del text serves as a euphemism for wiping out an entire paper just like the military uses euphemisms for many of their violent acts. The sudden change in font size is to point out how small words like del or h-bomb can make a large impact and therefore are bigger than they seem.
Part Two: Punctum
When I was digging through the images looking for something cool to do with them, I could not stop thinking about how the eyebrows of the left-most guy in this image...
...looks almost exactly like the eyebrows of the girl in this image:
After laughing uncontrollably for ten minutes, here’s what I came up with:
After laughing uncontrollably for another ten minutes, I started figuring out why I liked it so much: the best part, I think, is how the woman went out of her way to make herself up, yet the end result on a real woman is no better than an attempt by a man trying to pass himself off as one.
I’m nowhere near pro at Photoshop, so I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. It’s not even close to being perfect, but I’m at the level that if a moderately intelligent person who has never seen either of the originals before needs more than one good look to be 100% sure the image has been Photoshopped, I’m satisfied.
Since The Americans came out in the 50s, it’s safe to assume that the idea of interracial relationships were taboo when this picture was taken. I just took the controversy one step further by changing the relationship into a homosexual one. People are still uncomfortable about that these days, so I can only imagine how the reaction to my picture would’ve been if it were real.
Part Three: Sign Systems
Imagine the eight million people that subscribe to the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Now picture all the people who have practically lost someone they care about because that person spends all their time playing it. What if these family members all pitched in a few dollars each and hired the world’s best hacker to design a worm that made it seem as if leaflets rained down from the Zeppelins that transport players between continents? What would the leaflets look like?
And here's the leaflet, front:
And back:
The leaflets closely resemble the original, right down to the careless pasting of images, text similar to WordArt, and overall craptasticness. To help convince the addicts to quit, I put part of my argument in terms only they truly understand: item statistics. By presenting them with a piece of Rare (blue-text) armor and a piece of Epic (purple-text, worth more and usually better) armor, the addict will obviously prefer the superior True Love item. However, this “item” is obviously fake and requires the addicts to reestablish a connection with their loved ones, most likely by cancelling their WoW subscriptions.
- Photographs are indexical.
- The woman’s frown is indexical proof that the lack of attention from her WoW-addicted loved one makes her sad.
- The reverse is true for the happy family.
Icon
- The images of the two items resemble the items they represent.
Symbol
- The high-level, fully decked-out character is a symbol of an excessive amount of time playing World of Warcraft.
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