This corporation is obviously cool. Two guys from the corporate think tank are in this advertisement for the corporation just talking, just theorizing what’s next. I’m buying their stock; they know what’s cool, people buy cool, I buy into this company…
Looper – Mondo 77; Oh, obviously cool.
Slow motion video & normal speed thoughts? It’s like they think faster than the speed of light; Cool.
Crazy psychedelic color swirls? Is that cool? Shit, I’m behind. And I’m buying it.
Hashing Out a Movement questions the concept of ‘cool’ though a video work that reads as an IBM or corporate advertisement. The video posses a well balanced mixture of satirical plays and valid claims. The work starts with James stating, “Cool… is a setback for humans in general” which is followed by a hardy chug of the iconic Gollands / Markdis 40. “We have to be cool to succeed in society… We are too hung up on what’s new or what’s hip…”
After this attempt at a theory of cool, the narration breaks to a resigned text, peppered with bestiality and fish, robots and hampers. The video ends on a slightly elevated note, less resigned than the talk of bestiality and fish. It is difficult to extract specific phrases from the video; the three minutes forty seconds the viewer spends with the video are fluid and well formed. Hashing Out a Movement satirically quests for a theory of cool, but ultimately surrenders a unified theory to subjective definition.
