Juxtaposition
2 contrasting elements placed side by side
Over the weekend, while watching streaming TV, an ad interrupted the program. In one scene, a mother held her ~2 year old child. The mother said the tagline, then her child looked winsomely at the camera and echoed the tagline, too, perfectly.
Wow I thought. How did they get the child to do that so perfectly?
They didn’t. In questioning the reality of the piece, my eye strayed around the rest of the 30-second ad piece, and I saw the fine print: Performed by AI but real human frustrations.
For the last year, I wander through stores … I browse the Internet …. I see pictures … And I wonder: Is it real? Are the songs in the background at the grocery store real? Are the locations in that historical drama real? Are the people real? Or have they been edited in post to a different expression?
It used to be that you KNEW when you were suspending your disbelief. But now it’s happening all the time, and here was the evidence before my eyes.
The frustrations were “real.” Were they? I know enough about the business world and product marketing to know that even “real” frustrations get put through a filter to distill out the business’s ultimate goal. And none of the performances were real. None of the people. No 2-ish year old child acts like that AT ALL.
Does it matter? It’s just a 30-second ad on the Roku channel after all.
Also this past weekend, I went to my mother’s concert, which I’ve discussed here and here.
2 real human choirs, 2 soloists—a baritone & soprano, two directors, two pianists, and a filled audience of real people. All here at this moment together to listen to the only time all these elements will be here together. This is the only time all this will exist and can be.
And yet, we are connected through time by the piece which was written by Johannes Brahms in the 1860s. It’s a requiem but not written in Latin. Instead, Brahms wrote it in his native German, and instead of sticking to the Latin Mass for the Dead, he cherry-picked verses that were most meaningful to him.
All in all, the requiem is also an exploration of what it means to die; it’s here to help the living let the dead pass on and continue living our own lives. Brahms’ concludes with the thought that the dead are blessed because even if their labors are done, their works follow them.
It speaks of the imprint we leave on this planet and those around us. It speaks to the promise of heaven but also while Earth is a worthwhile place to be, too.
And that is something I wonder about as I look at the works being created right now. Sure it’s only 30 seconds of our lives…. But its 30 seconds in which your audience doesn’t understand how they are being duped or complicit or passive or intentional or more in their participation of it; they don’t understand that this is not reality even if it looks like reality. To the business, it’s all the time, money and labor it saved to create these 30 seconds …. Because if the outcome is the same, does it matter? But it’s also all the time the real people in the business worked to create these 30 seconds …. and maybe 30 seconds more …. of a child that doesn’t exist and would never act that way anyway. This is the work they leave behind.