Marketing works best when it toys with your emotions, speaking directly to your lizard brain. The most design-forward booths at CES come across not so much as product displays than as works of art or monuments, almost like a vulgarization of something that’s supposed to be transcendent. The Intel booth bathes the attendees in an unrelenting blue light, and overhead on a large, curved display something called an “interactive life form simulator” is projected, with rudimentary simulated “life forms” (generated whenever a passerby places his hand on a nearby panel) swimming around, colliding and sub-dividing.
“You’re contributing to the ecosystem and creating life,” says one of the Intel spokespeople. “Just like technology, once you put out the energy it takes a life of its own. So you have to be able to put it out in the universe, but once you do that you have no control over it.”
At Moneual’s booth, a large, abstract tree-like thing springs forth from the marble and AstroTurf. Artificial butterflies are suspended in motionless flight, while underneath company reps in the corporate uniform of white polo shirt with lime green collar and black skirt or slacks extol the virtues of home theater PCs and the company’s cloud-based home automation product.
These booths, like Motorola’s — featuring male models working out on treadmills and stationary bicycles, while nature scenes are occasionally projected behind them — gives one the impression of living in a spaceship (or survival condo) where the sanity of the occupants relies on making at least a half-hearted attempt at recreating the general “vibe” of the natural world, as it existed before the end times.
Then again, maybe the world has already ended, but we don’t know it. “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,” once said a French drunk named Guy Debord, “…everything that has lived has moved into a representation.” This representation is a virtual reality, but not in the mechanical sense that Philip K. Dick or the Wachowski brothers have written about — although it is no less horrific. In …
Source: The Verge
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