Image from bewareofimages.com
Non linear thinking
Sergio has been working as a Visual Communicator for 20 years. Born in Mexico City and holding a masters from Harvard U. his career started off helping performing artists. When the music industry started taking a new ditigal form his options were getting limited and he started taking on commercial companies. He just couldn’t get motivated to help these companies push their products to the consumers that: didn’t need the things, couldn’t afford the things and actually wanted these things to boost their social standings among people they probably didn’t care about.
After a time teaching at Vancouver Film School, he said,
“The more I talk with the students about the ethics of design, the less I want to participate in commercial advertising projects. It is clear to me that too many visual communicators are helping perpetuate an endless cycle of desire, consumption, obsolescence and dissatisfaction. It is also clear that this cycle is behind many of our social, political and ecological problems.”
The Movie!!
Sergio downscaled his life so he could finance and make time, lots of time, for his feature film, Beware of Images, about the power of mass media. It has been a much larger and time consuming project than he could have imagined. After five years in the works there is a tenative release date for mid 2012. I am expecting no less than a brillant film to give us all a cleared insight into the way the media manipulates us.
Beware of Images has a super inspiring facebook page filled with his creative and politically provocative pictures about the media’s influence in consumption and a little of this and that.
Digital Art: a poetic vision by Sergio Toporek is a 35 minute long presentation that he hopes will reveal an unexpected grain of truth.
If you want to read more about this, see my older posts following this theme:
- Tim Jackson Consumption and Living
- Freedom vs. the caged animal
- Ilha das Flores (One of my all time favorite movies! Some critics say this is one of 2000′s most important films. Everyone should see this!)