PAC Online

This page gives resources that point to, and maintain my projects perspective and vision.

Abstract

The relationship between art and advertisement is blurring. While art is examined critically, advertisements are viewed with increasingly less scrutiny. Marketers have more and more drawn upon contemporary art to spread their messages, further altering this bond. What should be arts reaction to this episode?

American culture is inundated with advertising, and my project (PAC) intends to add more, by producing a visual marketing campaign to promote a fabricated brand. Essentially by plastering the town with posters and fliers, PAC attempts to make people reflect on the subversive ways advertisers appeal to our senses and sensibilities. This project will represent and develop my interpretation of marketing. PAC’s brand will not exist, but it will be promoted in many traditional ways. By studying successful propaganda and marketing, my posters and media can reflect traditions in advertising.

This project will be present throughout the town of Canton. Any viewers curious about the advertisements will be directed to the PAC website. Here the project will be explained and the community invited to react to the art. All of the PAC art will be visible on the web site, and visitors would be invited to join the discussion, and express their ideas about the project and its pictures.

PAC is an artistic experiment in defining and disseminating mass-producible art. By printing fifty posters using a hand carved block PAC art becomes cheap and accessible. Because of its false and misleading promotional content, PAC tries to move the line between art and advertisement. PAC is a deliberate blurring of the definitions of ads and art, and it examines the positive questioning role art can play in society today.

Ending Abstract:

P. Alex Comeau
http://www.go.to/getpac

My summer, 2009 SLU Fellowship, “PAC Becoming Brand Identity: an experimental grassroots marketing campaign with nothing to sell”

OUTCOMES

1. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
However obvious, I would like to note that SLU Fellowships in creative fields are quite different than those in the sciences or other more “objective” disciplines. This became apparent to me during my first week at the SLU fellows townhouse during the summer. My project was designed to be an independent investigation from the start, working in conjunction with a faculty mentor, Assistant Professor Amy Hauber, but the onus of the research and direction of that work was on me. Having said that, the first and most personally resonant level, PAC was a triumph of self-motivation, time management, and an ongoing struggle with creative content; a struggle that I will continue to face in my ongoing creative production.  This project evolved organically from the start and continued to evolved over the summer as I had anticipated. In the end, while I came to no readily apparent conclusions as my research took a deliberately vague and paradoxical stance on a part of our culture that is rather concrete (if tricky) in its goals.

2. RESEARCH TO INFORM MY WORK
To begin my work, I focused on conducting extensive research on the history of PR and advertising, and then contemporary corporate culture’s accepted processes of conceptualizing, production and manipulation of brands.  After my extended research which is documented entirely on my blog at http://www.go.to/GetPac, and includes texts such as: Naomi Klein’s “No Logo,” John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s “Toxic Sludge is Good For You,” Christine Harold’s “Our Space: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture,” videos the BBC’s “Century of Self,” the documentary “Bomb It,” and PBS’s Frontline expose titled  “The Merchants of Cool.”   I was able to begin synthesizing this information into newer lines of inquiry, into what it means to be a member of our hyper-marketed culture and what it means to be a brand (PAC). I began my creative work.

3. CREATIVE WORK

The visual content of PAC straddled the line between polished, professional quality products (like most corporate advertisements) and less-polished, hand made and “low tech” art (such as a hand made flier or zine).  I tried to make work that highlighted the blurred line between art and ad, between privacy and publicity, corporation and cooperation, capital interest and cultural worth.  These themes are central to all of the visual work that I made, and they are also the reason I choose to become the brand.  PAC stands for Philip Alexander Comeau: PAC is me.  In becoming the brand, I was able to investigate on a personal level various corporate branding (representation) strategies. While my experience as a brand was somewhat disconnected it still offered a significant means of understanding image-as-identity, image-as-brand, or image-as-commodity. The issues raised by this are far-reaching, though the issues that I am most interested in, within this research, investigate what is really happening to our self-hood as a result of all of this marketing and branding.

a. new technology skills

Likely the most concrete learning in “skill-based” measures that I gained from my PAC fellowship, was my extensive work with a variety of programs within the Adobe Creative Suite of software.  I am  happy to say that over the past summer I became at least competent in using Photoshop, Illustrator, and to a lesser extent In Design. My faculty mentor, Professor Amy Hauber mentioned that she was impressed with the ease at which I was able to assimilate the programs, given my limited experience. These skills were particularly helpful in designing my brand’s blog as well as the multi-level marketing designs such as brand mascots, logos, stencils and materials such as tee shirts, matchbooks, buttons and stickers. Many of these products can be found for sale (with no profit to me at http://www.cafepress.com/getPAC) and most can be seen on my blog (url above).

b. new technology skills combined with more traditional creative methods
The above digital work, combined with more traditional handcrafts like screen-printing, drawing, spray painting, and printmaking, comprised the bulk of my studio production.

c. blogging, cross-disciplinary work, RW/WR model of readership, authorship (collaboration)
This project has exposed me to a learning style that is horizontal, cross-disciplinary and redefines authorship as well as readership. While I did not have the reader responses on my blog that I was hoping for (and is in part why I am committed to continuing this project), the fact that this cross-disciplinary project exists online and asks for dialogue and feedback redefines authorship in art and the sharing of ideas in new ways that I have not experienced in most academic settings. My hope is that eventually my blog/site will function as a site of interdisciplinary and collaborative discourse that encourages a RW/WR (read/write and write/read) environment as opposed to the typical top down read-only environment, leaving the viewer or reader passive .  PAC online functioned as both a journal, an artistic text or work, a medium with which to engage and report to others, and as an experiment that was partially subversive towards brands, partially an attempt to become a brand, and partially a work of artistic creation, in and of itself.

d. community intervention

The materials that I produced were disseminated into the Canton, NY community and I am continuing to disseminate today. I would like to get more feedback from both the campus community, Canton and other local communities over a period of time longer than three months. That seems only reasonable in order to be an effective experiment in engaging with the local public. Some feedback that I have gotten can be seen on my blog. Feedback has varied from confused to a bit hostile.  But, in what I hope is a reflection on the positive nature of this project, anytime I could give a face to my brand/blog reactions were accordingly positive and interested.

POSTSCRIPT:
The greatest product of my fellowship was neither works of art, acquired skills or even an amount of learning.  The biggest result of my fellowship was inching a step closer to an understanding of my existence in the twenty first century.  PAC was/is an investigation of one individual’s role in this particular modern society that some may say has lost its way. I am working on a book that will be self-published later this term that will document this project thus far and will send the Dean’s office and the MacKay family a copy of the book once it is printed.