The Static Noise of Advertising

For this assignment I mainly thought about the ways in which advertising (online, and print) communicates messages to us. From there, I took the direction of ads aimed towards women, that usually depict an unattainable goal, since the visuals we see are highly manipulated. Ads such as diets, beauty, clothing, makeup, even food/drink ones are all essentially brain washing their target audience to want to be something that isn't even real.

After seeing these sorts of ads for so many years and having them all send essentially the same messages...'buy this product if you want to look like this size zero model!', I really have began to think of them all as one blur of annoying static noise. So, I have created a series of three glitched pieces, and one base piece that I created in photoshop.

The base has many components, I took a photo of myself and put that as the bottom layer, basically to represent the consumer viewing all of this noise, then I took many different types of advertisements and made a collage/layered those on top of one another, changing the opacity on each layer.

From there I took the base piece into text edit and used find and replace to glitch it. I tried to have the first glitched piece be the least glitched (while still being unrecognizable), and the other two more glitched than the last.

The result was a visual representation of the overwhelming noise of ads that are thrown at us from many places, every day. I also tried to take my glitched pieces back into photo shop to edit them even more, but I had ruined the code so much that photo shop couldn't recognize it as a file anymore.