Need >>
Tuomo Tammenpaa
Need is an artificial brand that offers consumers a nonexistent product through
existing product strategies.
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||| HIAFF 3.0 | university of colorado | department of art and art history | digital arts area | in conjunction with alt-x | atlas | blurr
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[Reviews] Tuomo Tammenpaaâs Needweb takes the rampant globalization of consumerism, along
with the illusions of advertising, and runs it to its full course: complete
elimination of product.
An advertiserâs first order of business is to create or accentuate a need for a
product (or service), and then try to convince the viewer that only the
advertised product can fill this need, thereby making the product
indispensable. As consumers and media viewers, we have grown accustomed to
bright colors, hyperbolic rhetoric, and emotional manipulation that advertisers
routinely use to try to win us over. Needweb hacks right into this routine and
then loops it back upon itself. Using every available method to pull us in, it
rewards us only with exposure to other methods of pulling us in.
The Needweb interface is sharp, well-designed, intuitive, and hot-pink. It is
in itself a visual assault screaming for attention. It presents a laser sharp
beam of brand awareness that attempts to tattoo itself on the frontal lobe.
Continually offering access privileges that come only with exclusive
membership, one has no choice but to log in. Once inside, one is asked to
identify the most essential self needs and then is guaranteed that these needs
will be met. Promising new, pure, and un-cut products, Needweb lives up to this
promise by delivering nothing more than itself. By taking persuasive
advertising to its greatest extreme, it solidifies it, and turns it into the
very product for which it is advertising.
This concept can be found many places in our present culture: High flying
Internet stocks offered by companies that did little more than sell their own
stock, endless editions of collectable trading cards in which one is encouraged
to endlessly Îcollect Îem allâ, or how about those little green government
issue coupons that we are all so willing to kill and die for? A little time
spent on the Needweb site begins to expose the illusory nature of our needs and
our over-willingness to become victim to a consumer based culture. This piece
is an important work of art that creates an interactive interface in which we
can inspect and manipulate the media that fills the cavities in our emotional
wants.
By JOe Farbrook |
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