Caffeine Free Mother Water, 26th of February 2010, material from 2003
Sometime in August 2003, I applied to a contest that was, say, trying to be avangarde. The theme was advertismentocracy (this is a clumsy translation of reklamokracija in Croatian, meaning something like the reign of advertising). At the time, I really thought about the brave new world and the place I arrived at without being guilty at all. My contribution wasn't noticed and I didn't get any kind of response, but it has served the purpose to construct this world, almost six and a half years later. I remember a sunny balcony, Chilean black wine and cigarettes (disclaimer: please don't smoke, I had to stop also). In such a surrounding, I wrote a text that I sent along with the image. It is reproduced below.
While only recently, clean water was a Nature-given right of each one of us, today, the bottling and selling of "clean, quality" water is one of the most lucrative industrial branches with a strong tendency of growth due to pollution.
Due to unsatisfiable greed of gigantic "multinational" companies, an individual looses more and more of his rights. For example, the right to have a free health care is long lost due to the appetites of pharmaceutical companies and doctors-experts. We think of this right as of an utopia. The companies advance further, and they try to sell us what should be our right by birth - water. The advertising campaigns are, of course, a powefull weapon in the process.
Caffeine Free Mother Water contrasts the advertising slogan "Mother Water" that by design reminds one of sweetened carbonated drinks, with the background that shows Mother Water, instinctively recognizable essence of water. Water appears as a calm origin, a precondition for existence, as a motherly soft, resonant and warm representation, stripped down to the mathematical simplicity (the shape of waves on water was obtained numerically as a superposition of two sine functions with different periodicities and propagation directions).
The advertisment manipulates the instinct. The essence of water is stolen and tranfered to a convincing lie - a synthetic, virtual "reality". The advertisment in a perverse way becomes "more beautiful" and more regular than the reality, and manipulation of instinct serves to enslave the one who buys and enrich the one who sells. Mother Water, a deity in many cultures and civilizations, becomes an item of merchandise.
After all this time, I can say that I still like the blue color and soft transition in color across the curves of the waves. And concerning the advertisment... If I were to write a text on it today, I would probably write something regarind the influence of advertising on research and its valuation. Something like "How much advertising is needed to get you a Nobel prize?".
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Last updated on 26th of February 2010.