What does Advertising Want?
Cécile Jund
In her project, Cécile Jund scrutinizes how advertising influences perception and imagination through seduction and by inventing realities. By adding a new semantic level, advertising and other techniques of cultural rhetoric connect a product to a need. The intentionally provoked desire is experienced as deficiency, which is compensated by consuming the advertised product.
In order to disclose this seduction, Cécile Jund conceived an enlightening experience, showing how advertising functions and demonstrating how we may be susceptible for its artificial linkage between stimulation and product.
In this audio-visual experiment the sound is provided by a reading of fragments from the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel und Gretel fairytale. The voice and the assorted visual material appropriated from fashion advertising enter into a new visual-verbal discourse. Like in advertising, the fairytale influences the perception of the fashion images, and vice-versa. The new narrative that results from this incites reflection upon how the three creative media – photography, video and sound (the spoken word) – in combination generate new semantic levels. The video project consists of a combination of found and self-produced material.
