Smell My Post

I’ve been meaning to post about these ads for a long time. It’s a print campaign for the Kuro TV by Pioneer: seeing and hearing like never before. Very close to Sony’s ‘like.no.other’ I think you’ll agree. Anyway, the series is part of a wider campaign developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day. It’s all about synaesthesia, or the body’s ability to mix up the senses, e.g. seeing the colour green and hearing birdsong, smelling coffee and feeling like feathers are tickling your nose, or seeing the number 5 and feeling like a bright blue light is shining in your eyes.

While photoshopping different elements of a body together is nothing new, there’s something intense and dramatic about these black and white images that grabs my attention. I love the way a frightened eye and a frightened mouth combine to make something that’s infinitely more frightening. I’m in awe of how they’ve got something so processed to look like a real moment in time: alive, gasping with energy and heavy with anticipation. This is why the first of the ads below is my favourite by far – the concept’s there in the second one but it’s not as engaging.

Print ads in monochrome can often look feeble, flat and dull, but these look deep and inky, Hitchcock meets film noir. Add to that some vibrant, chromatic copy that aggressively repositions experience as we know it, and you’ve got an ad that really makes an impact. It’s just a shame that after seeing it at least fifty times I still couldn’t remember what it was for.

Go beyond sight. Go beyond sound. Enter a world where you look with fresh eyes and listen with new ears. A world where you don’t just see, you feel. You don’t just hear, you touch. You don’t just watch, you truly and fully experience. Introducing the KURO.

Look in ways you didn’t know you could. Hear in ways you didn’t know existed. Where you eye bites into a red so juicy it explodes in a gush <pffft> and runs down your cheek. Where every image can be tasted, every note can be felt and every experience is magnified in ways you can hardly imagine.

Defamiliarisation

DSC_0282, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

‘The problem of the artist is to defamiliarise the ordinary’ – Paul Rand, graphic designer.

The familiar consists of the scope of our experience. Outside of these boundaries, we are lost. When what we see doesn’t fit into the rules we order the world by, we’re suddenly out of our depth, forced to reconsider how we think. But how many times can this happen? Surely there comes a point where everything is ordinary, where nothing can be defamiliarised any more?

The moment of defamiliarisation is liberating. The transition from known to unknown, like a cat’s surprise at the wetness as it walks through a puddle, or a child’s realisation that it cannot touch the objects it sees in a mirror.

How can a photo ever succeed in defamiliarising what it portrays? The graphic designer has the advantage of working in a world that is not governed by physics and reality, being able to step outside of the inherent and imposed limitations of the world and into a place ruled only by imagination. By nature a photo has to have an equivalent instant in time and space, that is, it has to be grounded in the ordinary, which makes it so much harder for it to break down the ordinary. I suppose this makes it all the more real as an art form, and easier to identify with, because like us it can’t transcend the limitations of its form.