Derrie-Air
The fourth installment of the Arcadia Project was an experiment in mass media called Derrie-Air. As a modernist in the tradition of Benjamin, I believe in the timelessness of certain forms. I believe that the physical aura of paper will insure that print media lasts forever, even in today's shifting media landscape where more ephemeral digital forms are quickly arriving on the scene. I collaborated with another conceptually-oriented business entity--a local Philadelphia newspaper--to conduct an experiment in the effectiveness of mass media. We produced a series of thirty-six ads for DERRIE-AIR, a fictional airline where passengers paid by the mile and the pound. Under the Derrie-Air scheme, an obese passenger would be two or even three times as much for the same flight as a healthy, normal passenger. I dubbed this concept "pay what you weigh."
Like the other installments of the Arcadia Project, Derrie-Air used the public consciousness and ordinary advertising vernacular as an artistic medium. The results were extraordinary. The Derrie-Air homepage received millions of pageviews--more than 435,000 in a single day. The campaign received coverage from more than two hundred news organizations and was discussed on thousands of blogs. Before Derrie-Air, carbon emissions issues were a dull and fear-laden issue languishing in the minds of public policy wonks. Who, after all, really wants to talk about a worldwide climate-change apocalypse? Derrie-Air made the warming of the planet into something we could all talk about, something funny.
The Derrie-Air concept of paying by weight was later discussed on the Colbert Report, one of the most authoritative sources of news/satire in this age of irony and distrust. The click-through rate on the ads at the Philly.com website was more than triple the rate of an ordinary ad. If the success of a conceptual art project can be measured not in traffic, but by the befuddlement of critics, Derrie-Air was again a triumph. Among the appellations ascribed to the project were "prank," "hoax," "experiment," "promotion," and "test-gimmick."
Derrie-Air commented upon trends in American consumption and served as a catalyst to convert them back into raw attention. The first world is ashamed of its overconsumption, ill-health and obesity. Our public is vested in the notion of equality--that everyone, no matter how fat or lazy, should pay the same amount of money for the same goods and services. We like to pretend as though we care about the environment, so long as we're given ways to care that don't have much of an impact on our beloved luxury consumer lifestyles. (We savaged these notions with the phrase "green luxury.") Finally, we are obsessed with technology and the future. We refuse to accept the absolute permanence of certain modernist forms, like print. Turning print advertising into web traffic into raw attention is a simple matter of identifying and playing into these various insecurities.
There are even more disturbing conclusions that can be drawn from the Derrie-Air experiment, conclusions that cut to the heart of our epistemology and hopes for the future of Enlightenment. I concluded from Derrie-Air's success that the public wants to be lied to. They have come to enjoy and seek out "entertainment," which is really just a polite byword for deception. They want casinos that look like pyramids, yogurt that tastes like ice cream, and conceptual art projects disguised as ads. They don't want pure deception, but a mixture of truth and falsehood. This lets them fool themselves into thinking that the illusion is real--that they are not being fooled. And it allows them to arrogantly believe their fellow audience/public members are fools, even as they delight in being entranced by the very same spectacle.
Our present obesity is more than a physical phenomenon. Just as the cheapness of bad food has caused a softness of the body, so the cheap availability of bad information has caused a ring of flab to grow around our minds. The causes of overindulgence are the effects of overproduction, of surplus. These are the symptoms of the mall--a physical environment of maximum revenue and perfect control--and the intolerable boredom that follows.
The producers, meanwhile, are masters of the situation. Like Walter Benjamin's description of chess players at the Café de la Régence, "clever players could be seen playing with their backs to the chessboard. It was enough for them to hear the name of the piece moved by their opponent at each turn to be assured of winning." In the information realm, this suggests that the public's counterplay can be anticipated and engineered in advance. Derrie-Air sought to make this relation visible to all.