Don’t Look Up: Hyperobjects and Bland Branding

Popular reviews of Don’t Look Up have been polarised, ranged from admiring to dismissive. This Netflix comedy satirises the difficulty of compelling the uninterested to care and the failure of government to tackle our imminent extinction. As such, we are left with the question as to whether it is still possible, in 2022, to find humour in a film about the end of the world? Ultimately, the film is the product of the discourse it satirises; the star-studded cast and their activist message is lost in a failure to hold to account those most responsible for global warming by focusing not on the systemic but the individual. In looking towards object-oriented ontology, this review attempts to unpack the politics of care-lessness which envelops the hyperobject of global warming and the political systems of profitisation and branding which surround it

Towards glitch pedagogy

Borrowing from computing via media art, we introduce the concept of ‘glitch’ pedagogy to insert unexpected tension into the marketing curriculum, offering learners a glimpse into the underlying ideological structures of neoliberal higher education and opening up spaces of resistance and affirmation. We draw on neoliberal, marketised educational discourses and the bureaucratic systemsthey engender to illustrate glitches within the employability agenda, providing students conceptual space to leverage the contradictions and inequalities implicit in this agenda. As a genre of post-critical pedagogy, we argue that glitch pedagogy can move us beyond some of the noted dualisms of critical pedagogy to recognise the complexity of students’ emotional investments, in particularsocio-cultural and political positions by way of affective relations

Time to Imagine an Escape : Investigating the Consumer Timework at Play in Augmented Reality

Purpose: While the spatial dimensions of augmented reality (AR) have received significant attention in the marketing literature, to date, there has been less consideration of its temporal dimensions. This paper aims to theorise digital timework through AR to understand a new form of consumption experience that offers short-lived, immersive forms of mundane, marketer-led escape from everyday life. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw upon Casey’s phenomenological work to explore the emergence of new dynamics of temporalisation through digitised play. An illustrative case study using AR shows how consumers use this temporalisation to find stability and comfort through projecting backwards (remembering) and forwards (imagining) in their lives. Findings: The proliferation of novel digital technologies and platforms has radically transformed consumption experiences as the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, fantasy and reality and play and work have become increasingly blurred. The findings show how temporary escape is carved out within digital space and time, where controlled imaginings provide consumers with an illusion of control over their lives as they re-establish cohesion in a ruptured sense of time. Research limitations/implications: The authors consider the more critical implications of the offloading capacity of AR, which they show does not prevent cognitive processes such as imagination and remembering but rather puts limits on them. The authors show that these more short-lived, everyday types of digitised escape do not allow for an escape from the structures of everyday life within the market, as much of the previous literature suggests. Practical implications: The authors argue that corporations need to reflect upon the potential threats of immersive technologies such as AR in harming consumer escapism and take these into serious consideration as part of their strategic experiential design strategies to avoid leading to detrimental effects upon consumer well-being. More nuanced conceptualisations are required to unpack the antecedents of limiting people’s imagination and potentially limiting the fully fledged escape that consumers might desire. Originality/value: Prior work has conceptualised AR as offloading the need for imagination by making the absent present. The authors critically unpack the implications of this for a more fluid understanding of the temporal logics and limits of consumer escapism

Painting the Nation:Examining the Intersection Between Politics and the Visual Arts Market in Emerging Economies

Politics and art have throughout history, intersected in diverse and complex ways. Ideologies and political systems have used the arts to create a certain image and, depending on the form of government this has varied from clear-cut state propaganda, to patronage, to more indirect arms-length funding procedures. Therefore, artists working within the macro-level socio-political context cannot help but be influenced, inspired and sometimes restricted by these policies and political influences. This article examines the contemporary art markets of two emerging, Socialist economies to investigate the relationship between state pol-itics and the contemporary visual arts market. We argue that the respective governments and art worlds are trying to construct a brand narrative for their nations, but that these discourses are often at cross-purposes. In doing so, we illustrate that it is impos-sible to separate a consideration of the artwork from the macro-level context in which it is produced, distributed, and consumed