to be finshed... article

The Zeitgeist Forecast.

references:
www.rghtsblg.blogspot.com
“All famous (or underground) media practitioners have exhibited their work on way or another. Right now, most commonly it is via the internet – the infinite scale of it allows people to literally find anything they want. In other words, if you search it, chances are you’ll find it, or at least something related to it. Websites like Youtube, FlickR, Vimeo and Facebook as well as the more niche marketing sites like 4chan and Facepunch (targeted more at the internet-savvy geekier ones of us) are most definitely the leaders of the pack when it comes to spreading the word.”

www.thepop.com/
“POP 240 Tuesday, 9 March 2010
“Today's POP is Tom. He's got a bitching biker-jacket. We think it makes him look tough.
Giambattista Valli gave us a proper flash-back to our first encounter with Star Wars as he presented MONCLER GAMMA ROUGE in Paris. Remember those über-chic robots and weird sexy uniforms? As a young boy at the time, this was the apex of anything sultry and cool. No wonder we were charmed.“

These sites, all share information and styles that I plan to utilize in my article - they are: informal language, many references to other practitioners and an overall audience/writer connection.

Article:

Zeit·geist
–noun German.
the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

You may have heard of this term before, mentioned around fashion. The way it applies heavily to this area best is the fact that fashion, as a term to describe a trend in aesthetic or lifestyle choices, only manages to change it’s trends via the changes in a zeitgeist - a force created by a hive-mind-esque form of communication between peers, often through web 2.0 like blogs and image-hosting sites.
The current zeitgeist, or, “spirit of the times” we’re going through right now, I’d say is a transition from revamped visual revivals from the 1980’s, to the 1990’s. We can see this, as our recent craze for all things 80’s between 2004 and 2009 is slowly coming to a halt - instead of all underground imagery such as album art work, video and graphic design using imagery inspired by the likes of Robocop, Tron and Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, they’ve started moving on to more 1990’s based aesthetics, focusing more on popular visuals from the time such as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and Back to the Future (3).
An example would be the current and highly “off-the-radar craze” of remixing films for music videos, as first seen in Ratatat’s song “Mirando”, mashing up footage from Predator to a tribal beat. After seeing this video I was instantly introduced into a new scene, different to the commercial craze of geometric visuals and neon lit text e.g. Daft Punk’s stage imagery and M.I.A.’s music videos, that instead takes on more organic forms, such as african patterns and tropical wildlife - I think this could be an ironic revival of 1990’s, highly British children's TV that focused often on tropical wildlife and African savvanah creatures (like The Really Wild Show or Blue Peter). It is a very strange thing to try and describe, but one the best examples I can give is Douster’s music video for his track “Triassic” OR the increasing popularity of Rainbow Arabia, an afro-beat/techno/electro collective that are really reviving the spirit found in a lot of Leftfield songs via a lot of African inspired vocals or instruments. They re-utilize beats and breaks that have since become unpopular in the mainstream too, usually found in old acid-house and rave tracks, for example, the often sampled James Brown breaks.

Film Conventions:
(2004 - 2009: 1980's revival)
-Films such as Son of Rambow, revisiting a hyper-real period in the 1980's, ringing across more than life nostalgia and imagery - could be considered a stereotypically 19080's practice in it __________(more to come)_________


extra points to be made:
- a formula of a zeitgeist (why at the moment, do we only revive things approximately 15 years ago? meaning our current "look" is a revival of the TRANSITION between the 80's to 90's)

- How have conventions from both eras in film, music, art, photography, etc been blended together to created a look that is neither one or the other?

- What can we expect in the future - 00's revival of nylon combats and other tech textiles? will we end up looking like characters from the fifth element (ironically)? - (ONLY AN EXAMPLE)

- What conventions can we expect in the future in film, music, art, photography, etc? will we slowly invent a new style? what could it be?

- Timelines and charts to be created for visual explanations when literary would be hard. nicely designed Infographics