[Journal 1] Noé's Visions of an Apocalypse - Kriboon

 

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Noé is a French environmental NGO that “safeguards biodiversity in France and internationally”. This campaign came out in 2010 and was apparently run in the free daily Metro, which I believe was a French newspaper that was discontinued in 2016. This advertisement is titled ‘Kriboon’.

The linguistic message is overall confused and the weakest part of the advertising campaign: not only is it mistranslated, reading “It’ll be too late to complain once we’re finally forced to move home” where it should have read “forced to move FROM home” or “forced to move OUR home”. Furthermore, tracing the actual association from the advertisement is surprisingly difficult – searching Noé on Google yields no relevant results, nor does searching Noé Save the Earth. Since there is no website to link back to, I had to resort to TinEye to find a page where more about Noé was mentioned that I was then able to use to finally find the NGO. If it had said Noé NGO, then it would have been the first result. In spite of its errors the text is important and does serve an important function: according to Barthes, due to the polysemous nature of imagery, in which “all images… imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others”, the meaning of the image all on its own is very nebulous. It’s a horrific alien landscape that looks deeply cold and inhospitable, and yet there are people present, seeming to have landed from a spaceship, and the creatures impaled on the icicles bear some resemblance to sloths so the viewer may even mistake it for some hellish Earthscape at first. The text gives us context: “what is it?”, what purpose does it serve? There is clearly an environmental message being pushed with the linguistic meaning, as well as with the denoted message of a little green graphic of Earth, which helps explain why the viewer is looking at an alien world instead of our Earthly one, which would be what one would typically expect in an environmental NGO advertisement.

I’m not really sure how to tie my project into this, or to utilize this in my project, given the audio -vs- image nature of the project. What I did take inspiration from, however, was the subject matter – an apocalyptic vision, just not one of earth – and the style by which it is executed. This is just such an incredibly and deeply unsettling image – it screams hostile, dangerous and, above all else, cold. I think the artist really captured the feeling of an entirely hostile arctic wasteland that I felt viscerally that I would rather die than go there. I’m not so sure that this advertising campaign was executed the best way or the best fit for an environmental NGO, but by god if the artist isn’t talented and the campaign incredibly creative and unique. I could maybe utilize some of the visual elements – especially the harsh, rushing, jagged lines and cold tone, in my final step of creating the song images.