#but. why in the public perception are these counter culture movements so visually similar. its like the acceptable version of appearing alt

[a-a-a-anon]

the fact that the original fashion scenes of punk, metal, grunge, and emo look so different to post-mainstream commercialization, which is now like 90% black clothes for all of these counter culture aesthetics (at least in the public perception), makes me want to wear black less bc i feel like I'm buying into a manufactured image. lol.

[segafunk]

The intention of putting out a video about “The Future of Sega” is immediately clear. They are going to put the viewer at game conventions and on Internet video sites on notice that the company is trying to make a comeback, and to watch out for them.

A certain way of looking at Sega after they dropped out of making video game consoles is that they’ve had a steady drop in quality, and have become a virtual Nintendo subsidiary at the point children’s games and the nostalgic retro market converge. In short, the old days of punk rock provocation to appeal to counter-cultural sensibilities are over. This view tends to look most tenable in North America, as many of the high-quality games with this kind of cool appeal since the end of the Dreamcast in 2001 were made with a Japanese market in mind, and have had limited or nonexistent releases in America. To play anything from Jet Set Radio Future to Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Future Tone to Persona 5, it becomes clear a lot of what was cool about Sega is still being made. Assuming we’re able to play it too.

Still, Blake J. Harris’ Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation makes the argument that one of the major reasons for the precipitous decline in fortunes for the company after gaining majority shares in the American console market was the jealousy of Sega of Japan for Sega of America. Japanese employees were often reprimanded for why they couldn’t match the successes of their American subsidiary. So in the development and launch of the Sega Saturn, Sega of Japan was ill-inclined to take input from Sega of America, particularly in terms of a proposed collaboration with Sony. And then they made sufficiently many bad decisions on their own that they couldn’t compete with the Sony Playstation.

The subtext of American exceptionalism in Harris’ writing isn’t terribly subtle. But the fact remains that the Saturn didn’t have enough of the kinds of games that appealed to wider sections of the American public. This was compounded in terms of games like Tomb Raider being developed for the Sega Saturn, but becoming a major hit on the more widely owned Sony Playstation. A similar argument can be made of the reversal of the Sega Dreamcast from an extraordinarily successful launch to an abrupt crash. As much as I love bonding over discussion of the gonzo experiences afforded by the eccentric games on the Dreamcast, the uninitiated tend to regard it like that decade-old meme:

In terms of these quandaries, Sega has spent much effort in 2017 in a rebranding to attract the attention of anyone with fond nostalgia for their output back to the company. So far, this has met both successes and failures. The release of Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces for the 25th anniversary of the release of Sonic the Hedgehog has seen the former game borne of the international collaboration between the Japanese Sonic Team and the American fangame developers Headcannon become a renowned success. It has also seen the humiliation of the latter game, intended to be main showing with far more production value, being upstaged by a clever remixing of 16-bit sprites and receiving mixed reviews instead.

Sega has launched the “Sega Forever” project porting what is to be classic games on all their consoles to mobile devices, but has received criticism for a greater number of glitches than those whom have played ports on other consoles. Which is to say, quality control wasn’t up to par. At this point in time, Sega has adopted the rebranding of “Amazing Sega” in Japan, which amounts to a declaration of what reaction they want their games to elicit. A declaration of commitment to awe-inspiring quality. These things contexualize the public relations video “The Future of Sega”.

The opening shot is of an eye whose movements are biometrically measured by a computer. Fans of sci-fi cinema might recall that Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk film Blade Runner features an extreme close-up of an eye in its opening as a reference to George Orwell’s 1984 with its surveillance society of two-way media sending messages and receiving information. The same film features the “Voight-Kampff Test” tracking pupil dilation and eye movements as subjects are interrogated with a series of questions testing their capacity for empathy, and thus whether they are to be understood by American society as humans or android “Replicants”. This visual in Sega’s ad, combined with the technological white-out effect on the eye, appears disconcerting, a kind of technological “brave new world” of the viewer might wonder how they will get on in.

After the Sega logo appears signaling a major point of continuity between Sega games, we are introduced to the silhouette of “Toshiro Nagoshi/SEGA Games CO., Ltd./Corporate Director/Chief Product Officer/Entertainment Content Group” typing at his computer in a domestic high-rise setting, probably in Tokyo. When the camera moves in to a close-up, we are certainly not greeted with the image of a conventional Japanese salaryman. This guy is more edgy, more like a character in an East Asian gangster movie surrounding the Yakuza. In photographs, he often wears punk stylings like leather and leopard jackets, but here he’s going by the image of a way of doing business on the margins. Respectability in a conventional sense doesn’t necessarily get what people want, so Sega’s going to pursue a kind of maverick outlaw gaming approach. Nagoshi is in fact creative director on Sega’s Yakuza series; extraordinarily successful in Asia, and virtually unknown in North America.

An immediate encounter with this macho fellow might provoke fears of the kind of ass-kicking dispensed in his flagship series. But in his voice-over, he queries “When is a person moved? When they’re filled with joy? When their heart skips a beat?” The recurring problems of the finer points in English grammar when translated from Japanese are visible here. But the point remains that he’s motivated not in terms of leaving us bruised and sobbing by the side of the road, but by the means of understanding human happiness.

Nagoshi’s travels around the city where children and adults alike experience interaction design on their mobile devices have convinced him that these things have to do with “Experiencing the unprecedented.” The use of montage reassures viewers that Japanese favorites like Sonic the Hedgehog, Yakuza, and Puyo Puyo will still be kept in mind and made more accessible on these devices. Young women will still delight at capturing Sonic the Hedgehog plushies at a local Sega Game Center. But they’re going to be the kind of company that innovates and produces games that immerse the player into the protagonist. Perhaps more edgy games too, not just playing it safe with the once inconceivable alliance with Nintendo and their “family values” mentality.

Returning to the motif of the eyes at the beginning, Nagoshi says that compared to other animals, humans rely on their eyes more than other sense organs. Consequently, the eyes register a greater range of expression of emotion regarding an experience, including the telltale signs of amazement. On this principle, Sega has taken to the application of biometric technologies on test players to register their emotional responses at each moment, and take that data into consideration in the development process. Indeed, a viable argument for how they can create more fun and engaging games.

But stated another way, this means that video game companies, and tech companies that apply principles of “gamification” to interaction design, have greater insight into how to manipulate our emotions than ever before. Perhaps one major difference between the conception of dystopia in the 20th century and that of the 21st century is that it is now readily conceivable that such a state need not make the people who live in it miserable, indeed can make them highly engaged in a state that’s terrible underneath the perception of the media environment. Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century reminds us of the “interactive television” in Fahrenheit 451 and “two-way” TV in 1984 while books are banned in both cases, proving too fixed compared to the plastic memories of New Media and the revisionist needs of propaganda machines (p. 84). The technologies of video games systems connected to the Internet and picking up a greater or lesser amount of data from users have a great deal to do with that state of affairs. But for now, Sega sets out to create better video games in a world often resembling that of the antagonists in their past narratives, sending out certain messages with greater or lesser degrees of courage in this context. Ultimately, the Sega logo is shown imprinted upon the human eye in the extreme close-up of the final shot.

One important thing to take note is the Japanocentric nature of this vision for the company as presented in this advertisement. The ads Sega has shown these days in America have a great deal to do with nostalgia for the past made accessible on current technologies. But in terms of the vision for Sega’s future, they largely opt to show titles extraordinarily popular in Japan and virtually unknown in America. The focus is on the ways Sega has embedded themselves successfully as a brand and a presence in Japanese society, with little to say about an international orientation. While Americans are also shown this video translated into English, there’s a definite subtext that we’re an afterthought in Sega’s plans who may or may not receive localizations of their games, as has often been the case hitherto.

[caveartfair]

This Viral Instagram Account Is Changing Western Perceptions of Africa

Ginika is on her way to join thousands of Nigerian law graduates being called to the bar in Abuja, Nigeria. Photo by @tomsaater.

Taking selfies in Lagos, Nigeria. Photo by @andrewesiebo.

Too often, the African continent has been captured by the West in a series of clichéd images: women carrying jugs of water atop their head; children either starving or wielding AK-47s; elephants and lions silhouetted against a savanna sunset. But that narrow focus is expanding.

This overdue perspective is thanks in part to Everyday Africa, an Instagram account-cum-global movement that’s shifting photojournalism toward collective, localized storytelling—and now a new book: Everyday Africa: 30 Photographers Re-Picturing a Continent.

In 2012, its founders, photographer Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill, set out on an assignment to document the aftermath of a decade of crisis in Ivory Coast. Both had intimate knowledge of West Africa; Merrill as a former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, Dicampo as a freelance photojournalist. Both men cut their teeth on the continent in the Peace Corps.

On this trip, rather than photographing refugees and victims of the civil war—images that would likely have contributed to the simplistic narrative of Africa as a land of extremes—they reached for their iPhones, recording passed-over images of daily life. During a turning point in Ivory Coast, the two had pondered, “What does reporting look like if we just start photographing everything?”  

“With issue-based storytelling,” DiCampo says, “you decide in advance what images or what words you need from a situation; it’s almost like you’ve decided on a thesis and then you have to go and prove it.” For Africa, with its 54 countries and as many as 2,000 languages, that often means zeroing in on poverty, war, disease, or wild animals—objectifying the exotic, as if donning blinders to all that doesn’t fit inside this narrative.

Poolside scene at a hotel in Grand-Bassam, a popular beach community outside of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photo by @pdicampo.

Riding over the Niger River in Bamako, Mali. Photo by @janehahn.

“It’s not that those things in and of themselves are inaccurate,” says Merrill of well-worn clichés, from scarified faces to cultural safaris, that date back to colonialism. “The inaccuracy comes with the incompleteness of the stories being told. There are elephants in Africa; there are child soldiers. It’s the things that you don’t see that means people aren’t getting a complete image of a place.”

While following a convoy of refugees, DiCampo recalls photographing a child hanging from her mother’s arm, looking off into the distance, with his professional gear. “It was a very sad ‘Africa refugee’ kind of photo, [suggesting] an uncertain future,” he says. A few minutes later, he switched to his iPhone, this time focusing on a group of refugees rifling through DVDs at a roadside stand. “They were such different takes on the same situation,” he explains. “In one of them I’m drawing back on this knowledge of Western photographers photographing Africa, pulling from that visual library, and in the other I’m casually photographing what’s happening.”

It’s in that casual inclusiveness that Everyday Africa finds its voice. The Instagram feed, at 3,762 posts and counting, is catalyzing a new form of journalism that thrives not on the decisive moment but rather on a reality told in small pieces, from multiple perspectives. In doing so, it’s engaging a new generation of African photographers with newfound access to amplify their voices via social media, the internet, and mobile phones. And it’s giving them a platform—an audience nearly 330,000 followers strong, of Westerners and Africans and people of African descent alike—through which to define their own narrative.

Paakow tries to answer a difficult question on the iPad while his younger brother Ato looks on. Accra, Ghana. Photo by @africashowboy.

Jump rope in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by @hollypickettpix.

The just-published Everyday Africa book pulls from the Instagram account’s community of some 30 contributing photographers, both native Africans and international correspondents, collectively providing a balanced view from their respective corners of the continent. Their stories are often told via mobile phone—from Tom Saater’s image of a Nigerian law graduate en route to her bar summons to Andrew Esiebo’s snap of two women taking iPhone selfies in Lagos.

The book compiles more than 250 images taken throughout Africa. Indeed, you’ll find familiar scenes—like a Kenyan savanna plain dotted with zebras—but they may be sandwiched somewhere between a photograph of a Fellini-esque Italian sports club in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and an accountant enjoying a shoeshine in Conakry, Guinea.

Comments on the Everyday Africa account show how surprising some of these images are to certain viewers. In a photograph taken in Ghana by Nana Kofi Acquah, a young boy is seen playing with an iPad, his face illuminated by its glow. “Are iPads common in Ghana?” one person queries. (“This is a rich kid that poorly represents the majority,” another countered.)

DiCampo and Merrill chose to include these crowdsourced statements, rife with cultural stereotypes, in their book. It adds another layer to images like one by Holly Pickett, which depicts four children gleefully jumping rope in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Why, one commenter wondered, are Africans treated so horribly?

Three boys from the junior school of Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa,Kenya, race on the school’s track before the morning assembly. Photo by @austin_merrill.

Afro on purple. Silhouette of my daughter. Accra, Ghana. Photo by @africashowboy.

“That comment has a lot more to do with what that person brought to the image this it does with the image itself,” says Merrill. He recalls the television commercials of his childhood in which American actress and activist Sally Struthers announced that, for just 50 cents a day, you could save the life of a starving child. “We see those sorts of charity-related promotional materials, and images of kids with flies on their faces, all the time. It’s in your head—so you see a picture of [African] kids playing and somehow you automatically see crisis or poverty.”

DiCampo and Merrill witnessed similar bias and ignorance while on assignment in South Africa in the midst of the Ebola crisis. “People were saying to us, ‘don’t get Ebola,’ which was happening thousands and thousands of miles away,” says Merrill. “That’s all you see in the news, so it contributes to what you think of a place,” he says.

Fortunately, their push for global visual literacy has found its legs. It didn’t take long for Everyday Africa to spur a global movement. In a year’s time, the unaffiliated Everyday Asia cropped up, quickly followed by a slew of geographical focuses—Iraq, Latin America, and the Middle East—or issue-based accounts, like Everyday Black America, Incarceration, or Climate Change. “New ones pop up all the time,” says Merrill. “The ones that stay active we try to connect with,” like Everyday American Muslim, launched last year in Baltimore in the wake of the U.S. presidential election.

Though many of these projects are formed independently, in 2015 DiCampo and Merrill established The Everyday Projects, a nonprofit geared toward the propagation of Everyday accounts and related projects, from exhibitions to classroom curriculum, in an effort to foster a better understanding of the world through photography.

Aziz makes Coca-Cola deliveries with his donkey in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Photo by @dcoreraphotography.

A young Congolese refugee in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo.I was impressed by the look of her hair. Photo by @leyuwera1.

“Education has become a central element to everything that we’re doing,” says Merrill. In 2014, they began a pilot program with middle school children in the South Bronx for which they discussed stereotypes of Africa, and well as misperceptions in the kids’ own neighborhoods, ultimately leading to the creation of Everyday Bronx.

From there, they’ve worked with students in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Mombasa, Kenya. They’ve even landed Everyday Africa a place in Washington, D.C.’s public school curriculum, in social studies and art classes. “It’s exciting not only to see the way kids respond to the photographs and this way of learning about the world, but to see how they tell stories about their own lives,” says Merrill.

DiCampo and Merrill are also working to translate the photographs and accompanying Instagram commentary into a theater program, where actors will recite the dialogue in a live performance.

In these varied ways, Everyday Africa continues to chip away at the exoticized narratives established during colonialism and long overdue for an update. It has birthed a global revolution in photojournalism that’s moving even faster than DiCampo and Merrill can lay the tracks. And within a political climate in in which truth is continually on trial, the project gives an ever-growing community the power to play witness to reality as they’ve always known it.

—Molly Gottschalk

from Artsy News