The Crystal Ball of DOOOOOOOOM

I thought it was raffle tickets but no, it was just a name -and mine wasn’t even a winner. Well, actually the person behind the name is -but I didn’t know what to do with him. Mr Warren Buffett. Second richest man in the world. -He used to be the richest but due to the economic crisis he lost roughly 12m last year and now has to take his place behind his good friend Bill Gates. I read an awful lot about business and money stuff and stock markets and so on -nothing of which stuck with me. It’s all just gobbledigook to me. But I found out one or two interesting things about him. First of all he likes to drink CocaCola. Lot’s of it. And he made his first money at the age of six when he bought a sixpack of Coke from his grandfathers grocery store and resold each bottle for a higher price, making a 5% profit in total. And second: he likes to play the ukulele. I found this video on Youtube:

I also found a couple of “mildly” interesting articles about him:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_Warren-Buffett_C0R3.htm

www.businessweek.com/1999/99_27/b3636001.htm

http://beginnersinvest.about.com/cs/warrenbuffett/a/aawarrenbio.htm

For the first presentation on the day we were given the names, I had to come up with ‘some visuals’. I didn’t want to come back with just some lazy images printed off the internet showing an old man. So I went to Canary Wharf and tried to swap some Pounds into Dollar bills. Impossible. So instead I bought a can of Coke and took pictures of myself in front of Canary Wharf. Well, at least I made an effort…

My first idea for the end presentation was to try and track him down. So I sent him a letter -with these photographs enclosed, explaining about the whole project, asking him to meet me for a can of coke. I haven’t heard back, yet. The second idea was to buy a few cheap shares and watch them over those two weeks. But that didn’t happen since the whole process seemed really complicated and also you can’t just go and randomly buy only a couple of cheap shares. Then I thought I might just get a sixpack of Coke and sell it and see how much I’ll get for that. Another idea was to get 6 year old kids to sell sixpacks of Coke and take pictures or film them. In the end I faked the ‘meeting Warren Buffett for a can of Coke’ -and I wanted it to look fake, which is why I printed off the pictures a friend had taken of me, printed off images of good old Warren and simply stuck him unto the pictures, which I then framed and put up in the studio. Unfortunately my friend didn’t have much time. I would have loved a picture inside Warren Street tube station…

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

The Cornflakes. Yes. For two weeks, while on holiday in Germany I thought about nothing else but Cornflakes and I just couldn’t think of anything ‘new’. Problem was that I kept focusing on kids. And then, one night as I was brushing my teeth I thought: Döner Kebab. Döner Kebab Cornflakes. For the morning after the night out. And so I went to bed. The next morning I still liked the idea. So the next problem was what the box should look like. I wanted it to be different from the normal cereal boxes. So I had the idea of the front of the box looking like a Polaroid with the logo printed onto the t-shirt of the guy in the photograph.

A lot of detail went into the box -I even changed the calories. ON the top flap of the box is a serial number (not in the pictures) which is my student number and date of birth.  Iskender is the name of the town, where the Döner Kebab allegedly was invented.

For the advert I would have preferred to have filmed a guy coming out a pub looking rough and ‘follow him home’ , see him waking up in the morning -feeling rough and then for him to sit at the kitchen table having Dönerflakes. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone to act for me. So I had to come up with something else. I went into a Kebab place in Old Street and asked the owner if he would take part in this. And luckily, he did.

The original commercial has got subtitles. But for some reason they don’t come up on Youtube. I tried uploading the Quicktime file -but WordPress doesn’t like this.

Wish you were here…

For the postcard project, I got off the tube in Embankment and walked up to Covent Garden, taking pictures of every Starbucks along the way. The idea was to have six postcards of Starbucks claiming they were in different cities when, in fact they were all in the same square mile in London to illustrate that, wherever you go nowadays -it’s all the same, big chains everywhere.

In the end I decided to change it, so that all postcards are the same picture of the same Starbucks in Long Acre reflecting famous sights in it’s window. And to only use one font. The idea with the reflections comes from Jaques Tati’s Playtime. Another reference was Andy Warhol who said Peking and Moscow didn’t have anything beautful. Well, nowadays they do…

Surreal Walk

When I went on my surreal walk I was just getting really ill and felt wobbly and feverish so I guess it was the perfect precondition for this kind of venture. I walked wobbled down from Broadway market via Columbia Road to Brick Lane and picked up little things I found lying in the street. Not sure how to present them I just arranged them on my desk, took a picture and to add a pinch of surrealism -I framed them with ketchup.

And I just realised the fever must have gotten to my spelling cells since Broadway market is now called Brodway market. Well, I’m not getting out the ketchup again. It was a hell of a mess.

Surrealist Typography

For my surreal typography project I chose to do a movie:

My first idea was frying letters wearing a pony mask -where the rest came from, I don’t know.  I remembered that Hitler supposedly said “Art is my life” and the rest just evolved from there. The swastika is a very powerful piece of typography and I had taught myself how to write the old German handwriting “Sütterlin” so it made sense -in a way…  The letters in the pan are made up from the words: ‘Sieg’ and ‘Reich’. Meaning ‘victory’ and -well, ‘Reich’ but the two put together make the word ‘Siegreich’ which means victorious… The font I used is (very appropriately) called ‘Luftwaffe’.

High School Musical

This is the finished wall. 

I won’t put up the other writing -it would take too much space…

High School Musical

I have gone underground and built up an urban guerrila group to fight the imperialistic class enemy -which is High School Musical…

The idea is to make up a collage of different media on the wall and to make it look like some sort of news board or police profile board in order to get the narrative of my terrorist group actions across. The terrorist group is based on the RAF (Red Army Faction, active in Germany in the 1970’s -and currently in cinema in The Baader-Meinhof Komplex) because the ideology fits to what I want to say. High School Musical is evil and manipulative; Zac Effron andVanessa Hudgens have to (and will) die. Originally the group was going to be called DOF (Dina Osinski Group) but I will think up one that’s more related to HMS.

I’ve been researching RAF images and history and wrote my Manifesto (which is below this text).  I want to add articles, images and maybe one or two videos and make it look as authentic as possible.

Manifesto

Protest is, when I say  ‘I don’t agree with this or that’. Resistance is, when I make sure that the things I don’t agree with won’t happen any longer.   -Ulrike Meinhof

We have a historical responsibility to oppose fascist propaganda. The imperialistic class-enemy that is the Disney concern has gone too far. By imposing High School Musical unto the public and brainwashing a whole generation into the clutches of capitalism, it has proved that it will stop for nothing. It expects the public to consume any shit it dishes up, it wants the public to consume, eat and shop so that it doesn’t even get the idea to start thinking, to prevent it from gaining consciousness.

Consciousness would mean the public would have to act at some point. A conscious public would mean loss of profit for the enemy. For the capitalist, profit is everything and the people that generate the profit are scum. The perfidy of all this is that these actions are aimed at children and teenagers who are easy targets, terrorising them into consumerism.
The imperialist class enemy is generating an army of robotic consumers.

Protest alone will no longer suffice. High School Musical is fascist propaganda in its purest form. Therefore it was imperative to form an urban guerrilla group, The Dina Osinski Faction.
We have carried out the arson attacks on the Disney stores in Oxford Street, Covent Garden, Hammersmith, Westfield and Bromley and the bomb attacks at Disneyland Paris.
This form of active resistance is aimed against the disinterest with which the people endure the dumbing down of the masses.
The huge attention these attacks generated proves the justification for an armed fight to transform society.

The Imperialistic War Of the Media

We have already shown that we are ready to fight. And we will fight until the end. Since the state controls the media and the media controls the state, the state too is an enemy. We will continue our armed struggle until Zac Effron and co. will stop singing and dancing, until Disney gives up its perfidy and its monopoly. We do not have any other means to force them.
We will not give up until we end the control of the masses by this monopoly. We declare war on media terror. Failure is not an option. There will be no compromise.

We demand the immediate closure of the Disney Channel.

We demand the immediate discontinuation of High School Musical merchandising.

We demand the disintegration of the Disney Monopoly.

We demand an independent body to control the media and it’s influences.

We demand an end of the psychological manipulation of the masses through the media.

We demand nothing that is impossible.

We’re all in this together.

The Dina Osinski Faction
Commando Dina Osinski

Oh yeah…right!

I had two pages of excuses but couldn’t decide which were actually doable -I wasn’t really happy with any of them. So to take my mind off things I went for a walk and kept seeing these yellow selfridges bags everywhere. They have been haunting me for a while and I thought ‘right, that’s it then’.

Metamorphosis – Research

I first wanted to do Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson -but it is impossible to get good lace in this city and my staff was delayed in Brussels… Then I thought of Katharine Hepburn who was wearing a moth costume in one of her early movies, it would have been a 2 in 1 -but I couldn’t find an image that was big enough. Eventually I found a few big images that I liked and chose one of the Joan Crawford pictures. Unfortunately I couldn’t find out who took it -I reckon it was probably a shot by the Filmstudio.

Most of those pictures were too big to insert into the blog -apart from the Hepburn Moth, that one was too small…

Metamorphosis-Hollywood

This is my final “Metamorphosis”.

The idea behind the beer can is to illustrate that this transformation is only affecting me and no other objects. It could well be a beer advert: ‘release your inner star’.

Maybe it would work better with four images but I’m happy with the result. The first picture is me at ‘a party’ just having a beer when I realise that my feet have changed colour, in the second picture my hands changed colour, it’s creeping up over my shoulder and my dress is transforming and spitting out silk. In the third picture I just can’t help striking a pose.