This is the look & feel I am going for, but it obviously still needs work. The way it is now, it’s not funny like Dr. Zizmor.

Hello, my name is Liz. I am a candidate for the MFA in Design & Technology, which is a bit vague, but I focus mainly on combining cinematic narratives with participatory performance art and repackaging that experience for an online audience.

The project I want to present to you today is a cinematic narrative about consumer desperation to treat alienation and depression at work, told through a poorly executed viral marketing campaign for a fictional self-help miracle product.

The Product
First, I will describe the product itself. In this story, the product is not nearly as important as the experiences of the beta testers, who are given the opportunity to use the product for three weeks before the product officially goes on the market. The beta testers, who I will describe more a little later, have agreed to document their lives for the entire three week period while they test the product, and then their experiences are exploited through a seemingly clever viral marketing campaign to promote the product. So the audience really learns about the product through the video blogs of the beta testers, and everything else that we know about the product is from the product website, which is extremely vague and manipulative. So, what we know about the product is extremely limited, but what we see instead, is the desperation, loneliness, frustration, and anxiety of the beta testers, who are hoping that this product will somehow answer all their pleas for help.

The product is vague. The audience should never really know what the product is, but they should know that it is not a drug, it’s not a cult, it’s not a self-help audio book, it’s something new and different, and in that way, it may even seem a little like science fiction. It may be a contraption that the user enters in the morning to be readjusted so that they better enjoy their workday, something perhaps like the orgasm machine in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper. The product is therefore framed as a quick fix involving low commitment and high instant gratification. The website for this product is a lot like a zoloft advertisement, where it seeks to draw people’s attention by appealing to their desperation for help, and also sort of goes for a soft spot in the users’ imaginations because it is brightly colored, it is animated, and it’s abstract.

The product can never be fully disclosed for a couple reasons. In terms of the narrative, I wanted to focus on the lives of the people who are targeted by this product, rather than satirizing the type of industry that would produce something like this. [maybe should Garfield Minus Garfield]. The beta testers are contracted to never disclose any information about the product itself because the campaign in they which they participate is meant to exploit their mental health transformation to validate the fantasy that a product can really provide a quick fix. The marketing team for this product are smart because they know that letting customer imaginations run wild is more effective than if they were to confine their expectations to the look and feel of the actual product. But there is another reason why they can’t disclose the details of the product– because the product is a scam. It doesn’t actually do anything. If the manufacturers disclose any information about the product, they run the risk of being exposed as the frauds that they are.

What does this mean for the beta testers who are supposed to be promoting the product in their video blogs? Right now, I am going to run through a little description of the beta testers and how they drive the plot to reach this climax.

The Characters and Plot
The two beta testers are clearly pathetic. They hate their jobs, their social lives are flat lining, and they are constantly looking for some sort of escape. In this story, they are portrayed as being naively seduced by this product, but they are very sincere. If the story is funny, it is because we can identify with them, not because they are oddballs. So, they are doing their best. They live in apartments that are tidy and attractive, if not totally boring and un-lived in, they get up in the morning, shower, wear clean clothes, and they work 9-5.

The first beta tester is named Lindsay and she is an accountant who hates accounting. She is average-looking, sweet and soft-spoken, but she has low self-esteem and she clearly has never really lived. I imagine her to be like [the girl from the Office]. She found the product on the subway home from taking her father, who has parkinson’s disease to the doctor’s office in Queens. Ultimately, she decided to try it because she was sick of her job, sick of being a young, single woman taking care of her parents. She felt like she was in an emotional rock bottom and she didn’t know what to do, but on her way home, a beautiful woman in all black struck up a conversation with her and suggested the product to her, handing her a pamphlet about it. She said that she had used it herself. Lindsay is optimistic and naive, but shows immediate changes in her self-esteem in the first couple of days of using the product. She talks about quitting her job and prepares herself everyday to do it, getting closer to the deciding moment. Then she has a bad date and spirals back to where she was before, becoming increasingly frustrated and unconvinced by the product. She doesn’t quit her job. Her blog, which is, of course, censored, becomes shorter and the entries clearly have undergone a lot more editing. Lindsay finds a way to put out one final entry on another blog, or somehow finds ways to speak about the product in other places in order to create awareness of the scam.

The second beta tester is named Chad and he is an analyst for an investment banking firm. He is your typical, white male, who avoids seriously thinking about anything in his life. Instead, he lusts after college days when he had more friends and more time. Now, he feels alone in New York City, where he has been living under a year. All around him, people are getting laid off. The morale at the office is down. People are scared to be out of work. Chad is depressed and anxious, and the possibility of losing his job has sent him into an existential life crisis, where he wants to pursue adventure and is trying to be open minded. He meets a woman at a bar who is more friendly than anyone has ever been to him since he moved to New York. She tells him that the way she jump-started her life was through this product, and she writes down a web url on a napkin. She whispers a password in his ear and she leaves the bar. Chad goes home and goes online to enter the password before he forgets. In his half-drunk stupor, he decides to be the beta tester for this strange product, which he decides he will explore more in the morning. Chad is a little confused about how he became a beta tester for this vague product, but he accepts it, and thinks of it as God’s plan for him. He warms up to the product. Then, he becomes fanatical about it. He quits his job and decides to become a street solicitor for Greenpeace after he watches An Inconvenient Truth. He realizes that he has made a good decision and maybe wants to pursue environmental science. He doesn’t really use the product anymore, believing that all he needed was to get away from the life he had. Somehow, this makes him the poster child for the product. When he tries to tell people that they really don’t need a product like that to find happiness, he is censored. Chad continues his video blog elsewhere, where he is committed to telling people how to get happy, but it slowly tapers off as his life improves. [Picture Chad from the Real World on the Dave Chapelle Show]

More on Form
So the stories of these two beta testers are told through their blogs, which include video entries, photos, tweets, and text. Everything is scripted. The interface for their blogs looks sort of like the Non-Society girls’ website, only more simple. It is easy to look between Lindsay and Chad’s content and compare their experiences. This is a micro-site off the main product site. The product site has a looped commercial on it (which is evocative of the old Zoloft commercials), and some other information. This interface looks a bit like the Blueprint Cleanse site. The overall aesthetic, however, is slightly less classy, perhaps looking a bit more shady, like the Dr. Zizmor subway ads. [The only thing for which I don’t have a precedent is the structure and framework of the viral marketing campaign.]

The project will be entirely scripted, shot, and compiled before the project launches. I will seek a grant for releasing the project when I have some wireframes, the commercial, some content for the video blog entries, and some treatments to show for the idea. I will need the grant to hire friends to help make the website, and to get actors (probably also friends) to play the roles.

My thesis is a satirical narrative about the palpable desperation to be helped, bailed out, or fixed, in this case told through a backfiring viral marketing campaign for a fictional, self-help product that promises to alleviate career-related anxieties and restore mental health. Ultimately, the mysterious product turns out to be nothing more than a scam that rests on the imperative that the user should quit their job to prepare oneself for a life-changing realization, which, of course, never overtly occurs. As the product is slated to hit the market in 2009, the story is told through a couple of fictional beta users whose experience is documented in a poorly executed viral marketing campaign that attempts to create hype around the product. At first the beta users believe in the project and internalize the message that they have done the right thing by quitting their jobs. As the narrative develops and the campaign approaches the launch date for the product, the beta users become increasingly disillusioned and hostile about the product. As this is a brand new concept, the project is in an infant stage, but it relates to previous incarnations of this thesis through the driving impetus.

My impetus is rooted in a lifelong concern for the pivotal moment of positive change in a person’s experience, and in shaping, reflecting, or illuminating this moment through participatory art and storytelling. An extension of this concern is the fascination with radical lifestyles and potentially alienating personal decisions based on the internalization of political ideologies and community values. My work tends to seek creative and clever ways to make visible the social boundaries that have been naturalized in our culture through dominant politics, ideologies and beliefs.

read the full PDF of the brief.

I forgot to mention that I watched Woody Allen’s Sleepler last night and woke up with a fresh look at this stuff.

thesis has been revived!!!!!!!!

If you put your hand up for a high five and no one returns it, you look silly and feel sheepish. Worse, if you ask for help from someone you trust and they don’t help you, you are left feeling hurt, rejected and overwhelmed by your problem. But there is something that always seems to be there for you, even when your personal relationships fail you, and that is the self-help and the health industry. Feeling crazy? Get a shrink, start to feel better. Feeling fat? Buy a fancy “cleanse” and drop some pounds. If it doesn’t work, you get your money back. Consumer behavior always validates and makes you feel better. That’s why it’s so empowering. That’s why you shop and isolate.

But what if you don’t get what you want? What if a consumer product has left you feeling overwhelmed by your problems? My thesis is a product that does just that. The promise is intriguing– a way to feel better about your career life in this time of economic stress. It is a plan to help you give up everything you have worked so hard to achieve in order to prepare yourself to be happier at work. And if you’re willing to do that, this product is right for you. That’s it, no catch. Buy the plan, give up everything, you will be happier at work.

Of course, I don’t want to actually scam people out of their money, and I don’t anticipate that many people will want to give me their money. To that end, this product will be released in 2009 for purchase. However, as the manufacturers are trying out a new viral marketing campaign, they have gotten a few lucky participants to agree to document their experiences with a free beta trial before the release date. These experiences will be made available online. At first, the experiences are generally positive and then increasingly cut short and scarce as the users clearly become depressed and unhappy. When the product release date gets closer, the users have been totally censored by the product manufacturer and have begun to release their own outcries against the product on other social media sites.

The online experience is designed for people who have found this product and want to investigate whether or not it is real. The product has to be as audacious and terrible as Dr. Zizmor. The ongoing campaign includes vague testimonials, strange diagrams, infomercials, and street give-aways. It is driven by the test users’ experiences that seem to “tell all” in the manufacturers’ lame excuse for a viral media campaign. The users will continuously be reminded that they have done the right thing and given up everything to prepare to have a life-changing experience, but they will quickly see that this is where the product ends, and that they have been scammed, which sucks because they have signed contracts.

My thesis concept is to illuminate a desperation to be helped, bailed out, fixed, so that as the campaign drags on, participants internalize their expectations, only to be let down. Their increasingly hostile reactions are indicative of a larger reaction to the economic crisis in New York City. The product also serves to illuminate the willingness to be manipulated by consumerism because of a consumer desperation for a quick fix. The users will be isolators, will have extensive emotional health issues that they are hoping will go away.

NOW, TO DO:

• wrap up impetus paper.
• write domans/precedents paper.
• write scripts. write the narrative.
• create some wireframes and logos.
• create mgfx storyboard and style frame for a commercial.

well, in this case, apparently the driving theme of these three projects on these topics is the concept of “rock bottom.” i had a really rough day today, but it has been the creative rock bottom of my thesis, which is actually a fruitful thing if you know anything about being at rock bottom. i heard myself today saying that my spirit has been broken and that i don’t believe i am ready for a masters thesis and that i just want to get through this so i can graduate. i asked myself, ‘do you want to finish your thesis?’ and i am very relieved and happy that when i dug deep down for the answer, it is sincerely and profoundly ‘yes.’ it took me a little while, but eventually, i came around and realized the following:

i know this is not the best thing i have ever done, but it is a process, and from this process, i have learned more than i could have imagined in the last 2.6 semesters. i have learned that i want to pursue art and creative writing through grants, teaching, residencies and fellowships. i have learned that i don’t want to do anything that means i cannot make pursue these passions, which means i don’t want to do serious production or work in a motion graphics house or on an animation team. i want to do whatever i can to support my creative endeavors. great. so, i can’t really imagine cutting off this learning experience just short of the home stretch simply because i am scared that my thesis will fail. you know what? it did fail. and now i start over. and i do that NOT only because i need an MFA, but because i need the experience of knowing what it is to fail and to get back on the horse and to keep taking my ideas further.

so i thought about writing class today (which turned out to be very emotional for many) and i talked to some people and i realized that for me to finish my thesis, i have to figure out my personal motivations for this process. this is not something i have done. i have assumed that if i have a good, clever idea, i can coast through this part of the process. not so.

so, tarynne helped me realize today that i am most interested in defining moments in people’s lives. and then by myself i asked, why? well, because i am going through one! 2008 has been the most defining year of my life for two reasons: barrack obama was elected president and i got clean and sober.

in may, i got sober. i quit drinking and started going to meetings. it has been an amazing experience, but definitely a confusing roller coaster. it is clearly not something i am eager to share with my thesis class, although some already know. but now i know that this process has been central to my critical and creative conceptual process, and therefore, it is important that i face it.

“rock bottom” is the theme of my thesis and my life, kinda… when you get sober, the first thing you do is recognize that you hit rock bottom, or else you would never be getting sober in the rooms in the first place. then you recognize that you are powerless over your life. these were hard things for me to admit because i like to think i have it all together. when i got sober, i wanted to think that i was just doing what any sensible, well-adjusted person would do if they realized that they had to focus and stop fooling around all the time. welllll, it goes a little deeper than that, turns out. slowly but surely, i recognized that the last night i drank was my “bottom.” and it took me a long time to see the value in these revelations.

but here’s the thing. when you are at “rock bottom,” people pity you. poor you. you failed. but actually, they should be saying, “congratulations on the revelation. how do you feel?” being at rock bottom means that you can only go up, so it is filled with a tremendous sense of hope, faith, gratitude, and humility. in this space, if you allow yourself to truly let go of all your baggage, you can become purely open-minded and teachable. it is in these moments of emotional rock-bottom that most tremendously ambitious people discover the most life-changing, earth-shattering revelations because they are actually listening.

so all my projects this year have been about rock bottom, but none of them developed fully because i was unable to make this connection. but, these projects should be asking others to reconsider their unfortunate situations as opportunities rather than obstacles because all they may have is hope and nothing else to lose. that is where i wanted to go, and that is where i will go now with my thesis.

only, i want this to be from my heart, my experience and not from the experiences of those around me. i don’t want to rely on people telling the right stories and showing up for the interviews. i can do this.

also, i realized that a thesis about rock bottom is essentially about the most crucial aspect of storytelling: the climax. and since i profess that storytelling is my passion, it makes sense that i study how to tell the story.

finally, i have begun to recognize that there are two types of inspiration that have shaped the creative decisions in my life. the first is awe and the second is admiration. awe encompasses all inspiring people and things that appear unattainable, life-changing, and completely daunting. i have always experienced awe when reading favorite novels and watching favorite films. part of the reason why these things are so daunting is because they rise above all in the flooded markets of fiction and film. also, for me, they are daunting because they fully tell the whole story in an engaging, emotional, intimate manner.

the influences that i have admired are attractive, exciting, possible, and promising. these are the things that i have experienced and felt, “huh. that’s great. i can do that. let me try it.” and these things are the things that i have pursued because they are safer. while i have spent my whole life wanting to be a novelist or a playwright, i have instead pursued critical writing, cultural studies, poetry, performance art, and participatory political art. as it turns out, all of these disciplines require a measure of distance from the work, and they are all, more or less, antithetical to the storytelling model.

so there you have it. i have been naive about thesis and it has set me back months, but now i am ready to go again. and do it right this time. now i have a theme and a concept in which to work and i need to develop a couple ideas…

right, so the concept is: our lives are most defined by our ability to listen for the right voice when we are in our lowest form. that voice is the beacon that takes us up and away to inspiring productivity. now, how can this be a project?

This process isn’t working for me. I have been working my butt off, trying to package all my thoughts and ruminations and experiments and documents into one neat little presentation every week and it’s killing it. This isn’t how projects come together. It’s not how good ideas flourish. I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s the bloody 9+ hours or presentation/critique/analysis/writing we do every week, but something has to change.

the trajectory of this project is not linear. i learned that the very hard way when i came to the end of the line with the youth advocacy piece and felt like i was dropped off in nowhere land somewhere between may and september, only actually, it’s november. i am pissed off and exhausted and really sick of presenting crap, and not inspired to make anything. i am sick of taking advice and minding criticism and analyzing everything to the bone. i don’t have a thesis. i just want to make something– anything– that makes me happy, makes me think, and sets me on a path somewhere.

i care too much. i can’t help but imagine what would have happened if i started fresh instead of carrying out this mini-thesis.

anyway… here is an outline of the sustained inquiry i have been working on from day one…

-What is the role of contagious media, viral marketing, and social media in today’s culture?
–Can the flow of contagious online content overpower the influence of mainstream media content?
—-Can the flow of contagious media be influenced or predicted by a socially minded campaign?
——–Is contagious media overloading our collective consciousness with trite fantasies and distractions? Does this form of media negatively affect our ability to learn and engage with one another?

-How is performance art documented? How can video documentation be manipulated to be more easily shared on the internet?
–What components are needed in a video of a street art project in order for it to become “mediagenetic” or rapidly shared on the internet and covered by the news?

-Can performance art serve as a replacement for mainstream and online media in order to inspire teens and capture their imaginations?
–What are the stakes of performance art? How can it contribute to a cause?

-Exactly how does the military use advertising campaigns and monetary incentives to seduce young people into joining the military?
–How do young people feel after being seduced into the military? How can their stories be captured and retold to teenagers to expose the manipulation?
—-What are the alternatives to the military? Do teens know what they are? How are teenagers influenced to choose the career paths that they take? Why do they seek “safe” jobs? What influences them to follow their passions?
——–What happens in our late twenties and early thirties when we choose “safe” occupations or “play by the rules”? Are we career obsessed? What do we value when we focus so much on career?

and here is a link to the presentation i gave today.

I’ve been compiling a list…

1. Eames’ cinematic experiences… “House: After Five Years of Living,” 1955. Images shown at the pace of memory or thought… the idea is to force the viewer to make connections and make choices.

2. Woody Allen… I haven’t studied his films yet, but Anezka has told me how similar he and miranda july are in the sense that they capture the frenetic energy of their generation in a funny and weird way.

3. Brain Candy (Kids in the Hall)… a satire about the pharmaceutical company about a drug that makes people happy, but as it turns out, over time freezes their minds in a single moment or feeling in the past. It is a narrative that contains commentary and is based on a fictional product.

4. TV Carnage… a fast succession of found video and images from television that create a humorous yet disturbing portait of the vulgarity of mainstream american conventions.

5. sesame street… collection of clips made by various artists in various mediums, with each episode being on a theme related to literacy, etc.

6. i <3 huckabees… film about an existential crisis

7. the science of sleep by michel gondry… film about an existential crisis… director creates nurturing, community-based, participatory film experiences.

8. L Ron Hubbard & his “stress test” subway tabling… a way to promote a message to a crowd in person

9. reverend billy & the church of stop shopping… promotion of a political agenda through performance and character

10. miranda july…

11. AAAFFF… quit your job in marketing! we will give you a giant check.

12. deep thoughts by jack handey… self help parody.

–Perhaps this is an online experience and a video installation. It is not a film. I need to brainstorm ways to make it more interactive.

–Perhaps there is one screen that is like a TV channel replaying in the mind of the viewer (Eames style).

–Maybe there is also a video narrative that exposes “the daily life of the millennial/genx experiencing the existential crisis.” This can be based on observation and reports of the daily life of a couple different exemplary millennials and genxs in crisis. Or maybe I can give the subjects a wearable camera and ask that they record their life for one day. Then I can mix together the footage.

–The product “career cleanse” in on almost every set throughout the program, even though no one talks about it. The mystery around the non-product serves to intrigue the viewer, who has found this strange program though investigating the product, itself. In some ways, this is like Brain Candy, the funny, satirical “Kids In the Hall” film about the pharmaceutical companies.

–In “Quitting,” the narrator is an omnipresent yogi, who suggests that the act of quitting is a spiritual practice. She serves to keep the viewer on track throughout the journey through the multiple videos. The rapid cuts through these videos suggests the easily-impressionable and confused mind of the subject in an existential crisis (Eames).

–In “Joining,” the protagonist is the investigator, the one seeking how to “join” society once again. This episode vacillates between her experience and a series of investigative interviews with admirable people who have “joined” or committed to an effort, a job, or a lifestyle.

–She takes the positive experiences of the people she interviews and recreates them in her own eccentric, utopic vision. Throughout the course of this episode, she re-imagines various occupations, lifestyles, or experiences with a romanticism, but is continuously defeated and let down by the alienation she feels through her public performances. She ends up never really “getting it” in the sense that she cannot see how the very disparity between the others’ experiences and her own over-the-top interpretations of those experiences is a catch-22 that leaves her continuously dissatisfied, but also continuously expanding her vision and creating something new.

Career Cleanse product logo

Things are getting clearer by the minute. I just had a very long and much needed phone conversation with Anezka that was immensely helpful. Essentially, what I want to make is existentialist sesame street for adults. Like in the movie Brain Candy, Career Cleanse is a fictional product that serves as a way into the crisis. The program itself will be two full episodes: “Quitting” and “Joining.” Every aspect of the show will have it’s own grotesque amount of social media promotion and “micro-site” action… so there will be multiple “ways in.”

This week, I am writing two scripts, taking inventory of all the social media tools, and writing a treatment for the message that i want to send. it will be a tough one. wish me luck.