The Effect of the Power of Urban Advertisements on the Change of the Identity of the Metropolitans and thier citizens

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 MA in Advanced Research in Arts, Kamalolmolk University, Noshahr

2 Associate Proessor, Department of Performing Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

3 Assistant Professor, Department of Performing Arts, University of Tehran

Abstract

Nowadays, outdoor advertising media (including billboards, digital screens, and posters) in metropolitan areas are pushing man’s innately adventurous eyes toward new levels of unhinged insatiability, while creating a flow of seemingly encrypted visual messages in the process that have all but transformed the spectators’ perception of values and meanings. Advertising media in metropolises may be regarded as animated images scattered around big cities in bits and pieces, forming a sequence of images that rapidly, and indeed incessantly, cut through and affect citizens. In much the same way as the sequences of a film – where each frame is lit, projected in the eyes of spectators for a split second, and then fade away, leaving a lasting impression that is almost impossible to define or even to explain – advertisement media may be said to cut through time and space; they hurl the images at their audience in unrelenting fashion and put citizens under their hypnotic spell, alienating them from themselves and causing them to forget their true identity. One may use the example of a film theater where the spectators are locked inside and have no way but to follow what is happening on the screen; the images infiltrate the mind of the viewers, render their bodies motionless, permeate their existence, and become the object of their whole thinking process. Thus, it follows that advertisement media in metropolitan areas create a cryptic, multi-layer atmosphere all over the city, injecting in it a torrent of vague shapes, images of alluring human bodies and faces, meticulously chosen words, and various products to transform the very meaning of the city and turn the city itself into yet another product or image. Traveling under the watchful, powerful gazes directed at them by the figures on display in advertising billboards, is an experience that turns the minds and bodies of citizens into objects replete with motion and emotion, somewhat recreating their identities from scratch. Here, a paradoxical feeling of the simultaneous absence and presence of a given advertised product is created within the spectator: an unreal, virtual presence which is also an absence, and which transmits a sense of inaccessibility and exceeding ideality that effortlessly provokes the desire and ‘symptom’ of the spectator and compels them to long for the product and end up buying it. In truth, the citizen of a modern city may be described as a ‘flâneur’ who aimlessly saunters around the filmic atmosphere of the city – which is overflowed with advertising billboards and screens promoting products and consumerism – and finds within himself a gap, or a lapse, which he has been led to believe can only be mended by a montage of the countless sequences of images he has encountered and absorbed across the city. The said gap develops into a bizarre paradox that manifests in the form of a trauma in the psyche of the human being whose identity has been metamorphosed, lost its meaning, and become merely another in a long line of inconsequential product ready for consumption.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 24, Issue 4
December 2019
Pages 91-100

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