Advertising turned us all into agencies.

The unique behavioural artefact of the constantly connected world is our continual repurposing and recycling of its own culture into effigies and totems further and further removed from their original meaning. We no longer consume scenes, fiction, music - even current affairs and global events - without assigning them personal meaning, interpreting our lives and experiences through them and using them to express emotions, desires and ideas. We’re so connected to images, stories and ideas that we either cannot express ourselves without them, or see no need to.

I am observing this without judgement. I am not observing it without prejudice. It’s a language of living pop cultural semiotics that I speak naturally, and listen for naturally and increasingly it’s the language in which I think. It goes beyond watching a piece of art, or observing shaky iPhone footage of a massacre and noting how it rhymes with our lives…we co-opt these images, stake ownership over them, and use them to communicate.

Blood soaked villages are a big mood.

So are festival over-doses, superhero movies and shaving cream commercials. It’s all collateral that we use to tell stories.

I think it was inevitable, in a world in which our experiences were recycled back to us, that we became adept at repeating the process. Advertising turned us all into agencies.