Culture Jamming

The first time I ever saw Dolce & Gabbana's Winter 2007 ad campaign, I was shocked. The image, a man holding a woman to the ground by her wrists as a group of men look on, absolutely disgusted me, not only its overt sexuality but for its blatantly violent nature as well. I hated the idea of some little girl looking at this photo and finding it to be acceptable, even appealing, so I decided that this would be a great candidate for a culture jam.

While looking around online for some inspiration, I stumbled across the painting "Tarquinius and Lucretia", painted by Hans von Aachen. The painting depicts this story:

"Tarquinius was besieging Ardea, a city of the Rutulians. The place could not be taken by force, and the Roman army lay encamped beneath the walls. Here as the king's sons, and their cousin, Tarquinius Collatinus, the son of Egerius, were feasting together, a dispute arose about the virtue of their wives. As nothing was happening in the field, they mounted their horses to visit their homes by surprise. They first went to Rome, where they sur­prised the king's daughters at a splendid banquet. They then hastened to Collatia, and there, though it was late in the night, they found Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, spinning amid her handmaids. The beauty and virtue of Lucretia had fired the evil passions of Sextus. A few days later he returned to Collatia, where he was hospitably received by Lucretia as her husband's kinsman. In the dead of night he entered the chamber with a drawn sword ; by threatening to lay a slave with his throat cut beside her, whom he would pretend to have killed in order to avenge her husband's honour, he forced her to yield to his wishes.  

"[After the ordeal], she killed herself." -Wikipedia

It disgusted me how similar these two pictures were, especially with such a tragic story inspiring the painting. With this, I had already set my heart on creating a comparison between the two to send the message that it's unacceptable in this day and age for advertisers to convey such a sexual and violent message. Violence against women is something that should never be tolerated, and hopefully a culture jam such as the one I made can make the point that such obvious oppression is incredibly backwards.

For the culture jam itself, I first decided that it would be interesting to take the general design of the 2007 ad and transfer it over to the painting. It certainly looked cool, but it wasn't enough to actually show the similarities between the two images. I fooled around with layering them, placing them next to each other, among other things, but finally decided on creating a .gif that switched between the two pictures fairly quickly. This made the similarities somewhat obvious and was much more eye-catching than before.

Finally, I decided to turn the .gif into a billboard in New York City, to make it look a bit more realistic and interesting to the eye. I think it came out pretty well, and I enjoyed fooling around with video timeline on CS6. This was definitely an awesome project for the fact that it made you think about all of the advertisements we experience each day and how damaging they can be. I really enjoyed this project, and will definitely use quite a few of the techniques I learned in doing it (especially .gifs) in the future.