apocalyptic technowhiteness
so i know a few people have blogged on these images already (see the link to frank's blog) and sony has been facing a lot of criticism for it, but i still couldn't stay silent on this one...now i'm not sure if these are successive images and/or if there's some sort of narrative coherence to them at all. but let's deal with the "first" image anyway. so i'm assuming we're supposed to fear the oncoming of this monstrous/devilish whiteness, but we are definitely supposed to anticipate her "coming" (thanks to vin for pointing out that pun)...at least in this image, technowhiteness is transporting or making portable a black face, a face that in the first image at least is an androgynous one...let's move backward from this emerging technowhiteness and consider it within a context of the economies of the plantation...white mistress, black laborer...plus the obvious s/m dynamic here, which then must be situated alongside the possibility of bdsm racial play.................then there's the second image (or perhaps the first...i'm not sure how these images appear in their original context)...so portable whiteness is topped by black, what...stability?? do we assume that the blackness is portable as well? not sure. portable whiteness is still transporting a black face in the same way as the first image (the gazes remain the same as well)...but this face is rendered not as androgynous due to the clothing. so portable whiteness here is "overcome" (to again put orgasm in play) and overcome or outcome by this black female body...so let's throw in ideas of hypersexualized black womanhood...one that outplays even technowhite femaleness...........interestingly enough these ads were initially defended by sony who stated that they intended to depict nothing but "colors in contrast," but after the global outcry the ads were pulled earlier this month. sony claims that they received only one complaint about the ads from someone actually inside the netherlands (where the ad campaign was originally intended) which leads me to believe that sony did not foresee these images crossing national borders. obviously this raises some really interesting issues about the borders of the nation in an era of transnational capital and new media....it also raises stuff about cultural translation, readership and authorial (or advert) intentionality....so whadya think??
posted by shuck'n'jive at 8:48 PM
1 Comments:
We should also talk about the different audiences to which these advertisements are appealing. Vin and I talked about the bland middle-class milieu of the Geico commercial, in which Little Richard surely figures as an irruptive, wailing presence. The question is: to what extent and to what ends does the commercial's logic *rely* on a self-reflexive recognition of this contrast, thereby rendering Little Richard's presence irruptive yet oddly familiar?
As for the billboard advertisement, it's truly odd: a high-fashion aesthetic meant to sell PlayStation. Is this meant to register as "cool" among teenagers, twentysomethings, parents? nerds, hipsters, fashionistas? Americans, transnationals, Europeans? Without having a clear view of the billboard in its entirety, I will venture to speculate that part of the high-fashion aesthetic here is colonialist in orientation, noting the black subject's almost military-like button-down jacket. And are those epaulets I see? What about the white subject's feline gesture? her growl? Is this a high-tech, high-fashion, postmodern Back to Africa?
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