Drifting through Cityscapes Drifting through Cityscapes MTL final copy | Page 72

By consulting with mentors, we developed the idea
of a mock company taking over the Academy build-
ing as a provider of knowledge, which is packaged
as a product. In todays society, autonomy of learn-
ing is a hot topic as governments are leaning to-
wards self sufficient individuals who are selfgoverned
and can afford to pay as much as it is needed to
learn something. the goverment doesn´t need to
provide education when people can pay some-
body to teach them what they know. While trying to
prepare for our final presentation and brainstorming
possible ideas, the group came up with the idea of a
fake TED-talk as a performance, in which we, the
company, present to our seminar colleagues, our
product which is essentually knowledge. And just as
a real TED talk, we had an official photograph and
camera woman- everything had seem real. We took
the identity of a fictional company from the Alien film
universe, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. This com-
pany seemed as a good front for something so surre-
al as selling knowledge as a product. Even in the
films, their motto is ‘’Building better worlds’’ – ironical,
as they destroyed so much with greed and selfish-
ness for profit. We took over their fictional imagery,
including the colour scheme ( red, white, black –
strong, suggestive colours ) and the famous logo – a
symbol of the Egyptian god Ra, the Sun disk and a
pair of wings. For the final presentation, we prepared
a mock digital history of our company, in which we,
through digital manipulation, fabricated a ‘68 pro-
test photo to include our faces as participants of the
protest because our company fought on the front
lines for liberal and cultural freedom. In 2018, our suc-
cesful multibillion conglomerate offers people the
opportunity to learn what they want, how they want
it, when they want it – all for a price because nothing
comes for free. We chose to name our product ‘the
Prometheus knowledge package’, as Prometheus
was the bearer of knowledge in ancient Greek my-
thology. This product serves as a means to give peo-
ple the opportunity to be completely free as an idi-
vidual, an intelectual without the need to worry
about ever being opressed again. Literally, invest-
ment in knowledge to create the self-autonomous
intelectual being, homo autonomous. By using pow-
erful phrases as ‘individuality’, ‘sovereign’, ‘autono-
my’ and ‘right choice’, we manipulated our audi-
ence through a well-thought sales pitch. We even
made an Instagram account with our product and
company imagery. A really good selling point of our
sales pitch were original °360 photos of the Acade-
my building, which we digitally manipulated into
looking as our company space ( including banners,
logo and mottos ). These images are a visual repre-
sentation of our concept, privatizing that important
cultural, educational and historical space. The goal
of our performance was to convey how easy it is to
‘sell’ something non-material, something abstract as
knowledge, through manipulation and design. As a
result, the final idea of our group is a concept of an
exhibition/performance in which we, as a fictional
company, overtake the Academy building and sell
knowledge to the visitors who would even be given
a check on which they can see how much some-
thing costs – for example, how much 3 minutes in the
atelier cost. Through a few simple visuals, we could
easily perform this concept in the Academy space.
Our privatization of the Academy building has the
goal of pointing out the fragile state of education in
todays modern world. People who don’t have the
resources or money, don’t have the opportunity to
learn, which is a fundamental human right because
knowledge should be free. Through mapping the lo-
cal, we touched upon some delicate political and
social issues – art, our medium, was the glue that
combined those themes. And through irony and
mockery, our concept provides a strong comment
on todays state of affairs and state of mind in Buda-
pest.