Friday, April 25, 2008

The Three Culprits


An interesting disquisition by the inventor of Buddhist Economics, E.F. Schumacher:

For Schumacher there were three main culprits, that had all been corrosive agents in a world which had lost sight of individual responsibility and a world bound to the parameters of realism and science. These were Freud, Marx and Einstein. Freud had made perception subjective through his teaching that perception was subject to the complex interplay of the ego and the id, literally rendering it self-centered. This led inevitably to a change of attitude in human relations where self-fulfillment took precedence over the needs of others. Marx, by seeking a scapegoat in the bourgeoisie, had replaced personal responsibility with a hatred for others. His fault lay in his blaming of others for problems with society. Einstein had undermined belief in absolutes with his insistence on the relativity of everything. The application of 'relativity' in all other fields including morality, led to rejection of moral codes and responsibility.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Inspire 08 Conference

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex, e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype. Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution. [3]

Jung outlined four main archetypes:

• The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
• The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
• The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche; or The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche
• The Persona

Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images:

* The Syzygy
* The Child
* The Hero
* The Great Mother
* The Wise old man
* The Trickster or Fox
* The Puer Aeternus (Latin for "eternal boy")
* The Cosmic Man
* The artist-scientist
* The Scarlet Women
* The Faceless Man

-From Wikipedia


Often when given a client who requests a website to sell their new product or message, Creatives are forced to distil the essence of a client’s brand into ideas that are far reaching with multiple applications. A brand on it’s own exists within the context of the current linear time, needs, supply, perceptions and goals of it’s given society. This experience is often shallow from an objective point of view. Thus, one could argue that to communicate concepts effectively, a Creative must connect a brand to the archetypes outlined through Jung’s studies.

Jung theorized that humans rely upon archetypes to process the world in which they live. An archetype is a timeless, universal idea, which has emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual attributes that are deeply embedded within the fabric of the human psyche. The process of experiencing our everyday reality involves receiving external stimulus within the material realm and comparing it to these archetypes nested within the psyche to extrapolate meaning about the stimulus and create context. Similarly, by distilling brands into these archetypes, clients can associate their product or message with meaning that far surpasses objective reality.

For example, when one sees and advertisement for Gain laundry detergent, in objective reality, they are experiencing visual images and audio about soap which keeps clothes sanitary. There are multiple solutions for keeping clothes sanitary, but to distinguish themselves from their competitors, Gain may choose to advertise using images and sounds that appeal to a combination of the Great Mother, Hero, and Child archetypes. The mother portrayed is embodying all the qualities of the great goddess in her ability to provide for and take care of her child, the embodiment of innocence and purity. In doing so, she can become an everyday hero, overcoming the adversity of running a family and providing for everyone’s needs.

As in the case of Sciop and Troika at the Inspire 08 Conference, in order to distinguish their brands, they used visual images that relied heavily on organic, familiar textures with animation styles that reflect natural phenomena with properties like light, sound, fire, earth, water and air. These experiences take foreign ideas, like the Olympics or a movie channel, and begin to visually associate them with everyday human experiences with light, birds flying, the textures of the human hand, and more. Once they combined the mundane with the foreign, they began weaving meaning into the foreign ideas by applying archetypes. As in the case of Troika, meaning was added to the High Definition MTV channel by associating MTV and it’s brand symbol, music, with the archetypal narrative of the Tower of Babel and the quest of the Hero to bring spiritual enlightenment to a depraved world. The average observer may have no idea what they are watching on a conscious level, but to the subconscious, Troika is telling a story full of epic symbols relating to the soul, life, and spirituality and then associating all of that meaning to the MTV brand.

With this in mind, one may begin to see the significance and responsibility of Creatives. By invoking the artist-scientist archetype in their professional life, they serve themselves and society by tapping the imagination or creative aether to distill the material world into fundamental ideas. The modern day artist who comes up with the latest 30 second video animation for broadcast or micro-site for a new brand campaign, is charged with associating the mundane aspects of everyday life, a.k.a. material reality, with the unknown aspects of the psyche, a.k.a. archetypes. In doing so, whether conscious of it or not, they serve society by enabling it to engage with and know the self.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Welcome!

After many long conversations among close friends, it has occurred to us that each day we experience new stimuli that effect our perception of reality.

These experiences can be mundane, coincidental, dreamlike, psychedelic, emotional-well just about anything.

When trying to interpret these experiences, we need each other to help understand not only the stimulus itself, but all of the myriad of questions that come up in our process of assimilating the information into our world views about who we are, where we've come from and where we're going.

Let this be a forum for the exploration of ideas and possibilities.

Welcome.