Final MAPO Mission Statement, Twenty Year Projected Timeline, & Print Ad Series

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Final MAPO Mission Statement, Twenty Year Projected Timeline, & Print Ad Series

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Course Post 11. "Accelerationist Aestheticsâ & What to do With Beauty
librarianbyday.tumblr.com
âBeauty in itself is inefficacious. But this also means that beauty is in and of itself utopian.â - Steven ShaviroÂ
The second essay on âAestheticsâ in No Speed Limit got me thinking about the issue of beauty and accessibility (a line of inquiry also sparked by the above quote). My final project is still kind of up in the air in terms of the message that I want to deliver -- do I want to buy into the MAPO mask and try to sell the idea of it as a speculative artifact, or should I focus on how a product like this might ultimately fail?Â
Right now the MAPO mask will cost you around $200 dollars.Â
Shaviro defines Accelerationism as a âspeculative movement that seeks to extrapolate the entire globalized neoliberal capitalist orderâ (9). What we can gather is that trying to do away with capitalism is futile, but rather we should look at ways to reconfigure or extend the possibilities of such an order. I turn to the future of the MAPO beauty mask and how this would fit into the larger market, as a source of competition. The MAPO mask will act as a jumping off point, but something bigger and better is bound to come along. This idea also recalls some of the earlier discussions we had about âcompleting the setâ and how this is entirely impossible. I want to further explore the potentiality of MAPO as something more than an expensive beauty product that most people canât afford (as of right now).
How do Aesthetics operate in the future? Much of the criticism around world-building weâve discussed in class surrounds the hollowness beyond whatâs there for looks or âcool factorâ. Shaviro writes, âAesthetics is never essential, but this is what allows it to be irreducible to the essentialâ (26). Maybe aestheticism in the future should be exploited because itâs there just for fun? I mean we could all live without the MAPO mask but is that what makes it so special? Is the MAPOâs only job to make us beautiful?Â
On the issue of necessity, I wonder about the portion of people who wonât benefit from the MAPO, or who will be left out of this speculative future. I want to keep my audience in mind when trying to build on the idea of MAPO. If âbeauty presupposes a liberation from needâ (26) than is the MAPO really all that progressive? Does privileged beauty still have a space in our future discourse?Â
Course Post 10. Faulty Histories Make Even Weaker Futures
âItâs a call for a steampunk that explores all the conditions of its history: of the mill, and of the workhouse. Itâs the same impulse that, when a friend throws a 1920s party, makes me want to turn up as a polio victimâ. James Bridle, Starpunk
Woodstock, 1969.Â
1971 Coca-Cola âHilltopâ commercial, also used to end the Mad Men series.Â
So this post takes me back exactly ten years, to a VHI four-part documentary series called The Drug Years. I remember watching this documentary along with others on Woodstock and the 60s/70s more generally, and becoming fascinated (even curious) with drug culture as it was portrayed in itâs heyday. Because of this sparked, albeit shallow, interest in 60s counterculture, I also remember checking out The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe) as a high school sophomore and not knowing what the hell I was reading -- I never finished it.Â
In retrospect, I was so busy glorifying hippie culture and what I thought the 60s looked like, that I never stopped to consider the ugly side of this era as well -- the civil injustices, racism, sexism, rise in divorce rates, etc. I always think about Mad Men for this conversation, as the show tries to work against the cliches that weâve come to understand the 60s as representing, by exposing the ârealnessâ of what life was like back then; the show is a way of discussing these issues as they might have been dealt with. What Bridle argues for is a reevaluation of how we talk about these imagined histories, by looking at them as they really were. In turn, this can shape how we come to settle what we think the future will look like, by first authenticating the past and present that will come to inform this vision.Â
I bring up my own naive insights of the past, because I was convinced after a surface level exposure to what I thought the 60s was about, that I was âborn in the wrong eraâ. Can we take issue with this saying as well? That maybe itâs selfish to think that our own relational privilege to history doesnât consider the potentially harmful systems that shaped such a time.Â
Course Post 8. âHandâ Held Narratives and the Future Body
Aleksandra DomanoviÄ 'Substances of Human Origin', 2015Â
Aleksandra DomanoviÄ, âTorches of Freedomâ, 2013Â
Aleksandra DomanoviÄ 'Little Sister II', 2014
â¨Â http://www.tanyaleighton.com/index.php?pageId=587&l=en
An excerpt from the above link:Â
âThrough 3D modeling, DomanoviÄ has cast the âBelgrade Handâ as an actor in her ongoing exploration of womenâs liberation, art history and the history of former Yugoslavia and the Balkan region at large. The hand â the first of its kind and able to haptically respond to touch â is a representation of Yugoslavian innovation.
Focusing on the role of women and minorities as often overshadowed or misrepresented agents of technological innovation, DomanoviÄâs sculptures, in their quotidian poses â a hand holding a cigarette, apple or baton â subtly engage a history in which these objects have a deep semiotic and historical significance. The cigarette, in this instance, is rather a âtorch of freedomâ, a term coined by psychoanalyst A.A. Brill in the early 20th Century and then used as a marketing scheme by pioneering ad-man Edward Bernays. Bernays hired women to smoke publicly as an assertion of their social equality, while at the same time conveniently awakening a massive and previously untapped market of smokers.â
Continuing somewhat on my last post about the âfuture aestheticâ and what future bodies look like, we turn to the idea of exploiting the body for future use in Bret Victorâs âA Brief Rant on the Future of Interactive Designâ. Thinking critically about the use of our bodies and particularly our hands in the future brought me to the image âTorches of Freedomâ which I had stumbled upon weeks ago here on Tumblr. This image led me to the gorgeous website for the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, which houses many innovative artists such as DomanoviÄ and her work on gendered future bodies -- particularly how the hands and what they carry represent the liberation of gendered social conventions (the cigarette as a âtorch of freedomâ).Â
Visually her prototypic hands eliminate a gendered formality as the hands could essentially stand in for anybody, yet what they are depicted as holding (a cigarette, ketchup bottle, bird) somehow ground them in the everyday/familiar. Here the cold, mechanical hand intersects with say the tenderness of a tiny bird, bridging the distant future with something we can identify. ⨠Some of the materials she uses for these are models are plastic, polyurethane, aluminum, and carbon fiber.Â
Victor illustrates the numerous uses we can attribute to the manipulation of our hands, the very tools that define our humanness. Although I do buy his argument that we need to figure a more useful way of integrating our hands into future technologies, I do take issue with the ableist discourse he might take for granted in pushing this agenda. He slightly touches on this problem in the âResponsesâ section when he says, âChanneling all interaction through a single finger is like restricting all literature to Dr Seuss's vocabulary. Yes, it's much more accessible, both to children and to a small set of disabled adults. But a fully-functioning adult human being deserves so much moreâ; this seems to be more of an afterthought however. He does give a disclaimer that he doesnât have all the answers to the oversight of useless hands in âFuture Visionsâ, yet it is useful to think about who is left out of these bodily oriented interfaces. How can we better serve those who arenât able-bodied in the future?Â
On the topic of hands, this was brought up after Cavanaghâs talk last week: ⨠âThe Power Gloveâ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSnj63ipuzo
Course Post 7. Speculative Beauty & the Problem With theâFutureâ Aesthetic
MAC Cosmeticsâ newest campaign for Spring 2016. The models arenât radically different looking, save for some shiny silver attachments and glossy eyelids.Â
I do like this idea of beauty working for us.Â
A test subject of sorts? http://feinshowroom.blogspot.com/
The highly conceptual Speculative Everything was very approachable in its terms and what it set out to do -- to muse on the âwhat-ifâ question or questions. Through speculative design, we âgive form to the multiverse of worlds our world could beâ (160). That is, through design fiction we give rise to or formulate possible futures and not the other way around. The future is not something that happens to us, but rather something that comes out of the present conditions we have set for it. Looking at the countless interpretations of postulated realities and anti-realities got me thinking about how fixed our popular idea of the aesthetic future really is.
In popular culture and mass media we have been conditioned to think about the future in cosmic terms. I am personally interested in fashion and beauty and what (other) art does with these things, as these are of course art forms in and of themselves. So it was a happy coincidence when I saw that MAC Cosmeticsâ new Spring Campaign was âMAC Futureâ. With shade names like âMeta-Fabulousâ, âCybernautâ, and âSuper Novaâ we resort once again to a cosmic rendering of what our future will look like, as another world âout thereâ, far removed and completely disharmonious with our own. Itâs as if our own terms, ideas, values, etc. are not equipped to explain a fictive future, or at least a marketable one.Â
The answer (as evidenced with this campaign) is to create a new alien version of ourselves, a couture rendering of the space-aged human. This idea is invested in the covering of our human bodies, a way of masking the basic human with newer, sexier technologies (in this case fashion). One problem arises with the ideal streamlined human of the new age and that is -- the future looks very white. A simple Google Image search of âfuturistic beautyâ, âfuture beautyâ, or even âbeautyâ in general takes you to slew of white female images. Go to Speculative Everything and turn to page 16, again youâll see the famed âwhite spaceâ of the future applied to future fashions. A colorless future is highly problematic, as it reasserts the hegemony rooted not only in beauty, but in identity politics.Â
Something I want to explore further in my final project and MAPO Kickstarter is the erasure of colored bodies in fictive futures. With MAPO, semblance is crucial as everyone is instructed to put on the same kind of mask. It would seem the white, anglocentric model of beauty today seems to heighten in future renderings of the ideal human. Thankfully, future rhetoric reasserts that our predictions of the future are usually wrong (2). That our depictions of future bodies as devoid of color are highly unlikely; but what does that still say about the kind of colorless future we want to see?Â
âAt M¡A¡C, weâre always looking toward the future. We just happen to see it in the world of colourâ. - James Gager, Creative Director, M¡A¡C Cosmetics
Mission statement on M¡A¡Câs website: âM¡A¡C celebrates diversity and individuality â we are for All Ages, All Races, All Sexesâ.Â

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Post 6. Mobilizing Reality
The Walkman model I owned in all its steel blue glory.
Christophe Chemin, âNivĂ´seâ - part of a series of artworks commissioned for the #PradaFW16 Womenswear collection. I like the idea of 'Soundâ (in red letters) at the center of such a visually charged piece. Â
https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-christophe-chemin-helped-prada-explore-the-complexities-of-womanhood
"One set of strategies embarked upon by iPod users in their effort to deal with the contingent and chilly nature of urban space is to aestheticize it. This aesthetic colonization of urban space is in part a technological tale whereby urban experience becomes synonymous with technological experienceâ (Bull 198). The testimonies in âThe Audio-Visual Ipodâ cite musica mobilis as a means of setting the scene, a soundtrack for navigating the world around. Music provides a bridge to outside stimuli, so that each listenerâs experience is unique to their simultaneous performance of walking and listening. Itâs interesting to look at the idea of performance not only in the musical sense, but in the literal performance of this dual act. Is there something charged in the way one walks when listening? What comes to mind here is use of music in fashion shows, where as the runway is a more isolated event, it still influences the âperformanceâ of the show. If I was giving my testimony on this kind of experience it would be on my walk to class, as music makes this trek a lot less mundane by âcreating movement and energy in the user where there was none beforeâ (Bull 203).
The conditions of mobile listening are examined relationally when Hosowaka says, âWalkman users are not necessarily detached from their environment, closing their ears, but are unified in the autonomous and singular moment â neither as persons nor as individuals â with the realâ (108). I think Hosowaka is saying that the user is attached to the real in that the ârealityâ he constructs for himself (through music) is not possible without that music. So the combination of the two events (walking + listening) is what makes up the real. Something about the sound holds the userâs experience of the world in place.
I do wonder if audio-visual discourse reinforces the privilege of visual affect as opposed to just the isolated sound in question. In any case, it is imperative to align these two worlds in order to extract new meanings out of auditory experiences, so that they remain changeable.
Post 5. In the Mood for Sound
âRadio that instantly connects you to any conversationâ. Â Stitcher logo - Â https://www.stitcher.com/Â
A lot of why we listen to the things we do stems from either the mood weâre already in, or the mood evoked by the listening itself. Either way, sound directly affects our own situation by nudging us in the direction of how to feel.The images I chose this week may not be visually inspiring in themselves, but they do call to mind different poles of listening relevant to the notion of âActive and Passive Perceptionâ Michel Chion discusses in âThe Three Listening Modesâ. How does one âlisten with the earâ as opposed to âwith the mindâ (Chion 52)?
For the first image, I chose the Stitcher logo, a podcast app. Donât get me wrong. I love podcasts, especially when Iâm getting ready or doing tasks around the house. Weirdly enough, Iâm not a huge talk radio fan while in the car. Something about driving makes me want to zone out and fall back on my music. Of course my boyfriend on the other hand adjusts the radio to NPR whenever weâre driving. My critical thinking turns off when Iâm in the car. This is my place to space out on sound, either with CDs, radio, or my beloved Spotify app. Iâm cautious to oversimplify these distinctions, but could we acknowledge the first method of listening (podcasts, conversational) as active, since we kind of have to follow along and do some analysis? Whereas my preferred avenue of sound in the car would be passive? I can miss a few words, turn the volume down, etc. and not feel like Iâve missed something in the soundâs content or meaning. âSemantic listeningâ also explains why I can enjoy french music even if I donât understand the language.Â
âMusic for everyoneâ. Spotify logo & headphones. https://www.spotify.com/us/
Another important aspect to sound Chion mentions is its relation to film and how it bolsters our reaction to whatâs on screen: âThe emotional, physical, and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibrationâ (51). He points out that our reaction to sound intersected with a visual medium doesnât have to refer to music, but can come from sounds of breathing or other unsettling, unfamiliar noises (we see this a lot in horror movies).Â
This is why an effective soundtrack/score becomes just as important to the film as any other visual aspect (lighting, direction, cinematography). An example that comes to mind is the use of song during the end credits of Mad Men. To me, the episode is not complete until I hear the closing song, even though it technically isnât part of the action/narrative of the show. Rather the song is used as a marker of meditation to sum up the themes of that particular episode, a way of expressing these ideas in a way the dialogue canât. This inseparability of sound from image calls to mind the observation that âsong interferes with our perceptionâ (Chion 53), in the same way that sounds conspires with our imagination of the world around.Â
â¨Link to Mad Men end credits playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/pauldahill/playlist/0ot3K2fvyYyrKIxGlOTJcm
â¨Link to my favorite score, for The Virgin Suicides (shocker): https://open.spotify.com/album/4ChzUkrMJVlmXpekFlJws5
Post 4. Our Proximity to Sound
âVicki! I-I thought I heard your voice!â (1964) by Roy Lichtenstein, framed by a bustling city scape.Â
A young boy looks away from his mechanized factory town.Â
Taking into account the terrains of sound weâve learned about in Acoustic City, one theme prevails on how we perceive sound, namely our close proximity to it. Going back to the first chapter âUrban Soundscapesâ, we learned about the economies of sound in the city, a point that âAcoustic Gentrification: the Silence of Warsawâs Sonic Warfareâ returns to in discussing how noise operates at socioeconomic poles. Kusiak signals to âurban inequalityâ (207) as a marker of how sound is either cloistered or exposed, depending on oneâs privilege, and the tensions that arise whenever these communities overlap.
Maybe one way of looking at how sound is distributed, would be to suggest its evenness without these imposed boundaries. Perhaps sound is evenly distributed across the landscape, and our privilege stems from our ability to tune out the undesirable noise. Despite our imagined boundaries, we are all exposed to the same set of sounds.Â
Because class affects how we interact with noise, it might be useful to consider how sound would operate in a world that didnât entitle its listeners any sort of privacy, what would this cacophonous world look like? Boundaries of sound are important to the individual as well, an idea explored in the âMobile Listeningâ chapter from last weekâs readings. Recently, sound (particularly music) has become more privatized for consumers (see Kanye/Tidal fiasco).Â
The Acoustic City has been telling of how sound operates in the spaces that we afford it. In trying to bridge the rhetoric of Future with that of Sound, I think of the advancement of sound technologies in home media, and how it desires a close proximity to the real life experience of noise.Â