Soft Brand Abstracts: World Exposé
2010–2014
Originally requested for UNIPRESS, 2011–2012
Finishing funds provided by curator Melanie Buehler for BRANDS: CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY at S.A.L.T.S. Center in Basel, 2014
JASMINE LEE
Jasmine Lee and I met through an open call for assistance in getting a project made at World Expo 2010 Shanghai. That project was a R-U-In?S kiosk and Jasmine acted as a location scout during her trip. The R-U-In?S project in its 2009–2011 era was focused on the communal exchange between a clique of content recyclers in conceptual proximity. The project also became about the memes, tags, vocabularies, and identities that emerge and mutate in different “tribal” and social groups.
For the expo in 2010 I wanted to create a trade show kiosk to exhibit work from various identities in the crew, many of which repurposed branded visions into new types of imaging with communal and critical intent. The World Expos have become much like trade shows themselves, as culture becomes demonstrated through products and technology, and as national identity becomes branded.
I’d made contact with a kiosk manufacturer in GuangZhou through Alibaba.com who actually seemed legit, if I could only find a host venue and some curator or art liaison there to host it.
KATJA NOVITSKOVA
Unfortunately that kiosk never became real due to us never finding a willing venue. But another artist, Katja Novitskova, also contacted me about her trip to World Expo 2010 and told me of a similarly inspired project called World Expo 2020. Katja works in similar channels through the internet, publication, and sculpture. Her Post Internet Survival Guide project and my R-U-In?S project are closely linked, and she also sees the potential inside the World Expo platform. Yet, as we live in different countries, we are often focused on these interests separately while sharing distanced content in the cloud. She sent me her entire directory of photos from her World Expo 2010 trip.
ROB MINTZ
Rob Mintz is a curator of Asian art and an expert when it comes to Asian ceramics, which were largely produced to be exported, and which capitalized on “soft power”. A fair portion of the Asian art collection he oversees at a museum in Baltimore was amassed through world expos in the 1800s and early 1900s, when they were more focused on individual objects. Rob’s work touches on the underlying forces of these early expos.
KARI: Tell me the basics of your trip. How long did you stay and how many of the pavilions did you go to?
JASMINE: We stayed in Shanghai for three days, and devoted one of those days to the expo. In retrospect we would have needed a week to see the whole thing. I think we were there from 10 in the morning til 8 PM. I went into about ten pavilions: Africa, San Marino, North Korea (DPRK), Mongolia, Iran, Croatia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Myanmar; and ate at three of the ones that had too long lines: Germany, Argentina and Spain.
KARI: Was this your first trip to China and what was your impression of the expo in relation to China’s position on the global stage?
JASMINE: This was my first trip to China, north of Guangdong, since I was six. I’m a resident of Hong Kong and visit the southern region yearly. This question is interesting, because as you know, China is a huge country that is comprised of over 50 (recognized) ethnic groups. So a ‘first trip to China’ is a large question in that regard. However, if we were to qualify China with its major attractions (Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, and other ‘Mandarin’ destinations), that would probably inform our current understanding of the representation of China on a global stage. My brother and I felt like we missed out on the Olympics. There was still a residual energy from that as a major national event for the Chinese people that the Shanghai World Expo seemed to ride on. Aside from the thing as a spectacle, there was a sense of obligation to witness China as facilitator of such a highly regarded international affair. These events are like muscle flexing contests, boasting economic capability for technological and cultural innovation — and I don’t only mean that for the host country but for the exhibitors as well. In this case, size does matter.
JASMINE: When I emerged on an escalator from the subway station, my eyes were blinded by bright sunlight bouncing off the walls, flags and letters of pavilions vying for my attention. As I was heading back to the subway station after sundown, I could only think about all the countries that came all the way over to be a part of this expo and how few of them I got to see. The sheer size of the event is a testament to China’s role on the global stage, which also recognizes the primary audience — Chinese visitors. This is an important point to consider, because it’s easy for the economically liberal West (whose media is largely dedicated to painting China as ‘evil’) to feel uneasy about the success of such an event.
KARI: What do you consider your home country (if there is one)? Was this country represented in the expo? How did you feel about its representation?
JASMINE: I would consider my home country to be the United States, since I was born, raised and still reside here. I did not see the U.S. Pavilion because I could not find it. However, another visiting American said it wasn’t worth a visit because the pavilion had nothing to offer but a mural of corporate sponsors.
KARI: As I understand it, the U.S.A. received no federal money to participate in the Expo, and had to ask for funds from corporations. Allegedly they were the last country to confirm attendance, and raised the $61 million needed for the pavilion from corporate investments. Inside the pavilion were several subliminal and soft-branded corporate ads, such as videos of clouds that would end with planes and an American Airlines logo.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126479249
“We faced the initial challenge of putting 60 of the world’s biggest brands under one roof,” said content creator Greg Lombardo from Burbank, California-based BRC Imagination Arts who created the pavilion shows. “This is actually much of a soft branding exercise. I think that’s actually the remarkable story.”
SOFT BRANDING
Soft branding can mean a few things. It’s sometimes used to describe product placement or promotion in varying degrees of subliminal tension inside other content vehicles.
Another application of the term is the act of having a meta-brand that pops up or presents itself in customizable ways. For example, not every store under one franchise will look the same or carry the same merchandise, but the underlying brand and corporate structure will be the same. It’s often a way for a larger corporation to assume a half-and-half facade that mimics the unique diversity and regional contexts they’re aggregating and replacing. They aim to be a mix of something recognizable and something alien.
“Diversify or die” is a common motto in the land of entrepreneurs.
EXPOCORE AND MITIGATED RISK ABSTRACTS
The U.S. virtual pavilion from Expo 2010 is like a parody of itself straight out of Southland Tales.
All the countries were focused on a friendly, all-ages language, but seeing your own corporately funded national identity being translated into broad-stroke stereotypes is comical. It looks similar to Golden Films from Masakazu Higuchi and Chinami Namba, which are like cheaply traced re-makes of Disney fairy tales with other elements mixed in.
Golden Films were “For all the kids who couldn’t afford the legit movies” — Netflix reviewer
In Beauty’s Magical Adventure we see a Belle that exists as a hybrid of Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and a far less charming beast. The soundtrack is a mix of low budget “original” songs and Tchaikovsky classics, along with the occasional presence of Claude Debussy or “Moon River” by Henry Mancini — all popular choices for backing tracks (treated almost like stock music) of western movies in Eastern Asia. In making Golden Films, they did reincorporate some elements from the original fairy tales that were left out of the Disney versions, but in revisiting them, they couldn’t escape the impression left by Disney characters.
As the stories continue to travel as profit-seeking media formations, the imprint of the (seemingly financially and culturally imperial) Disney translation has been so strong that it’s become backwards compatible. It’s now embedded as it magnetizes with other extracted elements. Stories like these were meant to travel and morph through each telling, reflecting the cultural context of each place they landed.
This doesn’t only happen in the fairy tale realm. DNA, a movie made in the Phillipines in 1997, combines elements of Predator, Alien, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, and Pokemon, and literally titles itself as a hybrid creature.
Products, too, tend to seek out a market logic to what has been successful in the past, or to what seems most popular or hyped, then hybridize the logics of multiple strings together into a new creation which sometimes promises to be completely unique compared to its competition — a product unlike any other (though it is undoubtedly very much like many others).
When large amounts of resources and people are involved, the act of creation or production becomes treated as a risk, or involves risk assessment. Things that are proven in the market are used as a template for new products, and ride their hypewaves. Evolutionary and creative processes often result in things that audiences or external financial forces may not appreciate in huge numbers at the time, because they run on a different machine of decisions. Brilliant products (and their marketing) act as agents that change these contexts, change the game, or at least create a new niche for themselves and others.
It may take time for these kinds of changes to sink in, though, especially as each voice in the conversation feels pressure to dominate it or submit to the established dominant entity in order to survive. Change takes resources.
Market logic (and many times brand logic) in a capitalist arena tends to skew toward aggregational actions, away from communal behavior and away from a multi-player diversity, instead grouping that diversity into single options. Capitalism somehow still encourages monopolies.
When big money is involved, the wait time and other resources can be seen as too high of a cost. Incorporating planned audience response, territorial payoff, and financial success into these creative decision processes is a common strategy, but this inherently skews the final result, and can sometimes begin to work as a trap into short-term gain. This same phenomenon is outlined in theories surrounding imperialism and cultural hegemony.
When production of any kind is treated as an insecurity, something that simply aims to succeed in a pre-existing array of selections, it follows market forces and cues, and reblogs the tags and trends it sees as signs of the success of others. Or it purposefully diversifies from them in order to get equal numbers. Anyone who was done visual identity work knows that concept and identity are often an underbudgeted and rushed afterthought, and that the client often just wants to see the trends and tags of pre-existing genres reflected in the product or completely erased from it. That’s it. The danger in this when it comes to identity branding is that if an identity is too similar to another one, it will become a competition of resources or hype, and your brand seemingly risks getting aggregated into the “larger” identity operating in the scene. But, it can also become a trap to simply deflect from similarity to other entities, as you may avoid representing your true vision and work. Ultimately, the most long-term strategy in branding is to tell and be true to your specific, personal story. This will undoubtedly morph over time and have crossover with larger, manufactured or aggregated branding arcs, who will implicitly or explicitly urge you to diverge or group under their umbrella. Ella. Ella.
The blend of commonality and communal specialization that occurs naturally in cultural groups often gets trampled on the path to Big Product. The distance between the blended Cultural Product that so many people understand as valid, fulfilling output and the Big Product of the larger market is huge in terms of resources and concept, and should not be overlooked.
One could call Big Product outdated in a sense, but it’s not going anywhere, as the trickle-down it creates is what seemingly fuels economic expansion on a meta level. It’s certainly become dangerously overgrown, though. Cultural Product fuels economic expansion on a more micro level, growing or simply sustaining via the resources and community it can find, often on a much slower arc that might not be aimed at market domination. Cultural Product is often fine with staying niche. Market pressure wants to invalidate this kind of creation, but of course it is just as crucial, and is the cultural technology that bigger products are often trying to represent.
This concurrent existence of entities with different aims inside the same territories is nothing new. Occasionally there are successful, ethical crossovers or mergers, and at times aggregation is actually beneficial, but often the story here is one of exploitation as a failure to accommodate different logics, different cultures. Cultural Product is treated like R&D for more privileged or imperial brands who tend to get it all wrong, and identities are erased or assimilated into another platform’s guidelines for the sake of a single, commodified export.
In the startup industry your technology gets purchased — checks and press releases must be written. Cultural technology, because of how efficiently it travels in “immaterial” and abstract forms, can simply be absorbed, learned, and replicated as code and tropes. It can be punished for being beautifully accessible and bespoke. It can be destroyed for not reaching beyond its means, for not acting like Big Product or wanting to be it. Cultural Product and its workers need more support and sophisticated branding than ever in the face of rapid and abstract aggregation by Big Product entities, especially as many of these aggregators pose as Cultural Product in the public’s imagination. Here again is a site of compromise, where blended survival tactics must reinvent themselves daily through the resistance and innovation in their aesthetics while still delivering an authentic story.
RAPID PROTOTYPES AND POP-UPS
It’s clear in the U.S. online pavilion that they’re trying to resemble the style of animation that is more prevalent in Eastern Asia to be hyper-friendly, but it’s also clear they were under the same resource restrictions that facilitate the “cheaply and quickly drawn” aesthetic of many graphic novels. The result is like a pre-emptive bootleg — a reverberation of a distant story about a country that can’t afford the legit version of its brand. Even the soundtrack is the kind of cheesy stock language and chord structure that is popularized through its translation eastward into a kind of faux “universal” or “essential” lexicon.
“You’ve got a dream so plant it in your heart Then you can start to make your garden grow Water of love and bend it to the sun Now go on be the one to make your garden grow”
It then transitions to club music for the stage, to almost Lynrd Skynrd-esque generic parody music that conjures up images of highways and corn fields.
JASMINE: The expo grounds were split up into regions. China had its own region — its pavilion was the largest structure there. There was an eight-hour wait to get in. We took a picture in front of it instead.
KARI: What relation did you notice between the seeming amount of effort put into each pavilion and the way it was packaged, branded, and presented? It seems clear that some countries put more into their World Expo representation than others, or that at times there was a correlation between the geographical, political, social, and financial elements of a place and its pavilion’s formal attributes.
JASMINE: The bigger pavilions drew bigger crowds. The physical size of the pavilions also corresponded with the role of the nation on the global stage, which undoubtedly corresponded with the amount of money (funding/sponsorship) that nation had. So for instance the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and China pavilions attracted the most attention with their huge structures, and the wait time for those pavilions ranged from five to eight hours. On top of architectural and technological innovation, the major pavilions boasted free stuff at the end of your visit.
Japan definitely had the most buzz and longest wait. The ten that I visited would be considered very minor nations. The African Pavilion was a warehouse with all of the nations on that continent in one flat structure, with the exception of South Africa. The African nations boasted ‘culture’ not ‘technology’ — many objects were brought in to demonstrate their uniqueness as decorative objects. There was a huge relief sculpture of ethnically ambiguous faces made of some brown material to resemble mud or trees. It was near an entrance citing Africa as the place where we all originated from, something about a rhythm of life. No corporate sponsors advertised here.
KARI: I’m interested in the way each region has to translate their cultural identity into various image sets, forms, and materials — essentially distilling the processes of culture into temporary product and branding. The two major devices at play in these sculptural zones are icons and impressions.
Soft branding grabs formal and conceptual territory for an array of idealized payoffs later. The World Expo is a perfect site for this, as many visitors will never actually see the countries that are advertised. What’s important is that an impression, icon, and meta image of the country is forged or altered over time.
Each country is trying to sell its unique resources but the intended outcome is nebulous. Obviously your brand being a world player becomes a goal for many places, but I’m wondering what the payoff is like in the supply chain. These structures are communicating directly to, say, foreign representatives who are looking for business, and to the mind of the general public. Some materials seem to signify things like being “world class”, “luxury”, or a “new development” in the team of world powers, and some are meant to seem more carnal, primitive, or tied to the natural resources and landscapes. In some pavilions there seems to be an attempted blend of the two, for that popular “ancient modern” story arc. Add “future” to this cluster and you’ve covered all your thematic bases.
There are a lot of moments that feel like the worst of museum or mall displays, and the quickness with which everything must be constructed likens the output to the flimsy facades of a Rainforest Cafe or trade show kiosk. It also gives the pavilion objects a kinetic, fleeting quality. I should clarify that I love all of these aspects.
As each of these places attempt to print their culture-as-brand into quickly assembled and abandoned walkthrough structures, each pavilion becomes a cast or rapid prototype — a printout of ongoing processes that are molding each nation-state’s contemporary identity faster than branding or objecthood can capture.
Formally, many of the pavilions are merely square warehouse-like structures with some kind of decorative flourish on the exterior.
The comparison to other facsimiles seems obvious. Baudrillard talks about the replica of Main Street in Disneyland being more authentic than any Main Street USA because its admission of its own farce is built into the premise. But as opposed to, say, the replicas of various cities in Las Vegas, these are actually funded representations of cultures, decided by governments and leading creative producers, and supposedly directly tied to the places they represent.
Other pavilions worked toward being more abstract daubs on the horizon.
The more “conceptual blobject” pavilions came from countries aiming to show off wealth and futurity — to win the install shot of the group show of the expo by having the most surprising object in the array, regardless of inner content. This is abstract soft branding on the next, more meta level.
The UK Pavilion, a giant seed bank comprised of acrylic tubes that gave the building a virtual effect on the landscape, was raved about in architectural press, and certainly one of the most photographed pavilions at the Expo. This pavilion represented the UK’s role in the affair in a meta way, as it didn’t showcase the actual culture or exports of the place explicitly, but rather implicitly aimed to make an impression of the UK’s brand, showing its prowess through high concept.
CONCEPT V. CULTURE V. PRODUCT V. COMMUNITY
KARI: Which country is the most viral right now and why?
JASMINE: USA. Capitalism of desire and potential, tapped into our unconscious stream of experience. Connect or die.
KARI: What do you predict for future World Expos? Will you attend?
JASMINE: I can’t imagine another one happening in the same capacity, unless it takes place in a country that matches China’s economic prowess, and offers the same prospective number of consumers. The one in 2012 looks like a smaller affair taking place in Yeosu, South Korea.
(This has since occurred and was focused on an oceanic theme.)
KARI: The same seems true for the U.S.’s role in Expo 2012 in Yeosu. There was a call for pavilion proposals online in 2011 that made the terms of winning the competition clear — any firm whose design won would be expected to fund it themselves and should consider it a “gift” to the American government. It’s unclear whether this is the arrangement for every country or not. Ultimately I think of trade shows as a perfect place for exhibiting my own work, World Expos included. But as you know, I am often proposing projects to take place at these expos with little luck. They come so close to being real but the Expos have almost no relationship to an art environment that includes critical thought.
JASMINE: I hate to say it, but I think one of the main problems with finding an appropriate venue, or any venue willing to participate at the time had much to do with an existing language/cultural barrier, which is ironic if you really buy into the idea that the site of the World Expo would be one to facilitate a truly global affair. I think that inability is due to our positions from the outside, as it might have been different if we we were working with someone from the “inside.” If we were to relate this back to what you’ve said about networked collaboration, the lack of access could be symptomatic of a greater lack of web/community presence from those who are familiar with the Shanghai scene (maybe this is also a symptom of Chinese censorship?).
This brings us to a larger question concerning the shape of our community, what we can know from our network and how access grows/is granted with more reliable connections — in relation to your critical and self-reflexive interests in the intensified nature of brand-repping that takes place at trade shows and expos — a way to break into the market or maintain your status, depending on where you’re coming from.
KARI: From the first World Expo to now, how have they evolved? Were there any specific expos that marked a major shift?
ROB: Originally, the expos were tools of the French, British and by the later 1800s the Americans and others to assert their importance as organizers of events focused on world industrial development. The shows were events where new inventions could be demonstrated; the telephone, the phonograph, the camera, the moving picture, the television, etc. By the end of the 19th century the expos were events that nations used as a kind of tradeshow competition. Constructions, processes, culture, and the arts were all shown off in an attempt to claim some small piece of the world’s attention. To host an expo was to show your country to be a leader and to show at an expo was to broadcast your unique identity. This was largely the thinking from the first expo in 1851 through the 1930s. After that there is a general shift in the nature of them. They become more specifically about culture and the celebration of difference. By the 1980s they changed further in this vein to be about celebrating the cultures within nations. The 1986 Expo was largely a celebration of Canadian diversity. In a way this last shift is one toward nationalism or nationalisms as each political state displays the diversity of itself as a means of asserting national pride.
“If Expo 2010 were being held anywhere else — say, Amsterdam — there wouldn’t be any pressing need for a U.S presence. But just as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (better known as the World Columbian Exposition) signaled the ascendance of the U.S. as a major industrial power, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair suggested U.S. technological superiority, 2010 seems primed to represent the rise of Chinese economic and political power in the 21st century. A no-show by the U.S. would convey as much about America’s diminished place in this new geopolitical order as does its ongoing run-up of Chinese-owned debt. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has indicated that a no-show might be taken as a snub. Though few Americans are paying attention now, come May 1, 2010, when the expo opens, surely many would wonder why the U.S. is not represented among the gleaming, architecturally significant pavilions on the Shanghai riverbanks.” -The Pavilion Wars by Adam Mintzler
KARI: Can you explain the competitive role of Asian ceramics in the World Expos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
ROB: Competition among industrial artists was not something nearly as common in the West as it was in Japan. Japan, in part because it was modernizing very quickly after the change in government of the mid 1860s, chose to sponsor official competitions for artists working in ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, wood carving, joinery, etc… These competitions started in industrial cities where artisans would benefit from both the challenge of competition and from the infusion of government financial support. The Japanese believed in the power of the arts to change people’s lives and they believed it was the role of the state to promote the arts. The result is a culture of competition (Think of Iron Chef). This competition model was then taken by the Japanese to the world expos to provide a reason for the creation of art of the highest caliber. The Koreans have also adopted this model and today so have the Chinese, albeit in a different form.
KARI: What made a “winning” piece?
ROB: Skill seems to have been the most important thing, but the judges were certainly taken in by inspiration. The most successful pieces showed their craftsmanship through an idea that read as high art.
KARI: You relate this Okimono of a Pagoda by Komai Workshop to the Nike shoe of today. Can you explain this connection?
ROB: My point is not to relate the pagoda to Nike, but to the model shoe that often appears in a Nike store. I’m sure you’ve seen the enormous cut-away shoe that is used as a kind of demonstration of the inner technology. In the cut-away you get to see Nike’s range of flexible absorbent and springy materials that you are assured make the shoes better. The same is true of this big pagoda sculpture. It displays the range of techniques that the Komai Studio was able to master. The idea was that you could order smaller mixed-metal objects from the Komai Studio in any of these patterns or techniques and be assured of a high level of quality.
Originally published at karialtmann.com
Originally requested for UNIPRESS by Jasmine Lee, 2011–2012
Finishing funds provided by curator Melanie Buehler for BRANDS: CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY at S.A.L.T.S. Center in Basel, 2014
Further versions and formats can be produced by request
Continually edited
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