5x7 carved linoleum, red paint, sharpie, varnish.
On display at Artichoke Gallery for, like, several hours this saturday. Officially the most normal looking art I've ever made.
Don't worry L'il Buddy. I will eventually get back to posting nerd rants.
Oh yeah, I got accepted to WK12.7. Holy Cats!
If you start seeing beholders and magic missiles in sneaker commercials in a few years, suspect the hand of Booberry.
I spent the entirety of last weekend interviewing for a slot in this year’s WK12 program. 12 can be difficult to articulate to people who don’t already know about it, but I’ll give you my understanding of it.
Wieden + Kennedy is the world’s largest independent ad agency. If you’re reading this, that means you have internet access. It follows that you live in a place where you’ve seen some of their work. W+K is a global office, but is headquartered in Portland Oregon, where I live. For the past six years, W+K has been running the 12 program, variously called a school, an internship, a micro-agency, and a social experiment. The idea, or at least my understanding of the idea, is that they take a group of 12 creative people with no practical knowledge of advertising, and put them through an extremely intense year of internship, because by doing so they will find things that could not have been found any other way. It’s a crucible approach to education. Failure, or at least the kind of balls-out risk taking that could result in great failure, is openly encouraged.
Which is why I applied (the image at the top was my application, and yes, it's that way on purpose).
This is a relatively recent interest of mine. Prior to this, my experience with advertising was limited to the creation of punk flyers. I’ve never really thought of it as a career option. In fact, I find the concept of viral desire to be one of the more abhorrent afflictions modern man has unleashed upon itself. When I describe the program to my friends, the reaction I get is usually something along the lines of “Congratulations man! But why the fuck would you want to work in advertising?”.
I’ve come up with a pair of canned responses for these occasions, one of which very likely shovels dirt onto the graves of social acceptance and peer respect. The first, mostly innocuous idea I try to get across is what I call The Creative Argument, wherein I explain that being forced to find creative solutions to constantly changing problems you may not always care about, and to have to try and find ways to get others excited about shit that they might not care about, is a challenging and therefore worthwhile creative exercise.
The second and slightly more upsetting argument is the one I refer to as The Propaganda Argument, and I understand that it sounds vaguely sociopathic. It goes kinda like: “If you can convince someone to buy shoes they can’t afford, or a soda that tastes like shit, you can make them do anything”.
Calm down, that statement doesn’t have to be as sinister as it sounds. Propaganda, historically, is seen as a form of media manipulation ranging from carefully controlled views of reality presented through the willful omission of certain truths (Fox News), to mind control based on outright lies (Nazi Germany). But imagine the kinds of awesome social destruction one could wreak with a truth-based media weapon.
I’m not talking about putting up billboards that say “Fast food makes you fat when you eat too much of it” or “Soda pop is nutritionally worthless and causes diabetes”, or even “Your government is full of shit” (although I believe all those things to be true). I’m talking about genuine, utopian, hippy-values kinda shit. I’m talking actively empowering people to believe in themselves. To understand that being unhappy is a choice, not an assignment. To understand that we may all be stuck here together, and that we probably oughtta treat each other a little more civilly because it’s fucking sophisticated to do so, and that modern life is full of distractions and intimacy is becoming harder to achieve, even though it’s one of the only things in life that has any real value.
You don’t need a team of dream specialists led by Leonardo Dicaprio to plant these ideas in people’s heads, because we already know these things to be true. All we need is a way to remind people that they are important, to wipe away the sleep of apathy and remind ourselves that life does not have to be this way. The Future isn’t just a concept. It’s an ideal, a goal worth pursuing.
That’s all a long way from selling sneakers and energy drinks though. Maybe I’m just hoping to justify the fact that I’m trying to do something with my life that I still have some ethical reservations about. But I truly believe an idea worth having is worth clinging to, and that an idea worth clinging to is also worth sharing.
Two years ago I was dying of cancer. Now I am alive and the cancer is dead. To survive, I had to become an idea, one that was greater than disease and fear.
Anyone can do this if they have support. Everyone deserves that support.
