Our first project in ART 121 was to use Adobe Photoshop to create a Culture Jam. Our instructor described this concept as the following in his description of the project,  "Culture jamming is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist activists whereby existing corporate media such as logos, billboards, bus-ads, posters, commercials, and other advertisements are disrupted, subverted, and re-configured to produce ironic or satirical commentary about the corporation or product itself, commonly using the original medium's communication method."

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My culture jam pokes fun at Microsoft Windows. Specifically, there is a running joke that every other Windows Operating System released is a failure in some way, and that the following version always ends up being far superior. For example, Windows XP was one of the longest running most successful OS’s, but its successor Vista was plagued with technical problems. This pattern continued when Windows 7 was met with, once again, critical long running success. 7 was then followed by Windows 8, which was met with skeptical reception at some of the design choices.

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I decided to showcase this flaw by altering an older Windows ad I found (pictured below). I essentially rebuilt the ad from the ground up using the current Windows logo, a similar background, and a slew of different images of computers. My concept was to show the last 5 generations of Window’s OS’s lined up in a row on different screens, with the ones for Vista and 8 being damaged or negative in some way. I had several different ideas on how to mark the failed OS’s, but I ended up going with using their iconic blue screens of death. I felt this was the best option because it would not be as glaringly obvious and required a bit more thinking to connect the point of the piece.

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Putting the piece together was a tricky process that required a lot of overlapping layers. After the background, I had to get all the computers in place, which included cutting out a lot of background from each individual file. Then I replaced what was on their screens with the various OS’s screens/blue screens of death. Getting them all to size together well was very tricky. I had to also combine them all, flip it all around, and drop the opacity to create a reflection effect from the original ad. The text and windows logo were easy, but still required some fiddling around with to get them to a good point.

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Overall I learned a lot from this experience, and discovered a new interest in all that photoshop could do.