Just 'KIDing'!

Team KIDing, comprised of Angolan-born artist João António Fernándes and Portuguese graphic designer Edgar Coelho Silva, comments on the consumerist culture in relation to advertising with their series I Love Culpa (1999).  Advertising seeks to use hidden representational images or logos in order to discretely convince consumers to buy or use specific products.  Branding helps to make consumers automatically familiar with products while the context on which those brand logos are placed in advertisements help to create positive associations with those brands.

In their work, team KIDing takes an advertisement that suggests a relaxing vacation environment or the luxury of the beach life with a beach/resort photo and manipulates it to reveal the true intent of the advertisement: to sell the services and products of hotels and other corporations at the beach.  They do this by bringing into the forefront of the advertisement the various logos and brands that would normally be hidden within the advertisement while also blurring the background beach photos.

I particularly enjoy this work because it seems to be a simple manipulation to make a significant commentary about the deviousness of advertising and branding in addition to the conditioning of societal symbols or behaviors that are reinforced by mass media and marketing.  Other people are using these ideas in various forms of art in order to fight the reinforcement of performative behaviors reinforced by such marketing: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/brilliant-viral-video-satirizes-female-specific-advertising.

I do not yet understand the difficulties or technological aspects of this piece, but it does not seem to be very advanced.  Some Photoshop skills seem to be required, and that is all, but this piece was also created in 1999 when not everyone had such skills.  To go on a short rant, the beauty of its simplicity is that everyone has access to logos and branding. Logos are meant to be accessible and quickly understood.  They are meant to automatically and subconsciously become rooted in one's brain- some of them are even clever in adding clever hidden messages, such as the FedEx symbol in which an arrow is hidden between the 'E' and 'x' to imply forward-thinking, a positive and attractive quality in a company. (http://twistedsifter.com/2011/08/20-clever-logos-with-hidden-symbolism/) In finishing my thought, I enjoy that the simplicity of the piece reflects the basic idea that critically thinking is an easy thing to do: the intention of these symbols and consumer culture can be easily uncovered if the viewer is willing to heighten their awareness about what they are watching instead of thoughtlessly giving into the shamelessly cliche symbols continuously fixed into advertisements.