Give the t-shirts to the people!

The polis of slogan t-shirts (polis means city in ancient greek and is one of the first form of socially conscious urban territory). We are interested in how ideas can be embodied. Literally. How do you wear a t-shirt that says something? What do you say to that?

People tend to pick up mottos, have 'philosophies'. They relate to an environment they think they chose, but the very choice of that environment is influenced by an ensemble of peculiar social determinations. They pick up codes that filter reality, and that forge their identity in relation to the rest of the world, but often only the people who have picked up the same codes can understand this identity. They build up communities, and then they start a war. Rituals, from idiosyncrasy to populism, is what shape discourse. Reading and being read is what drive speeches around.

The political t-shirt culture materializes these dynamics of social textualities. It also brings up its contradictions. For example, a kid wants to buy a guerilla t-shirt, to express his disagreement with the bureaucratic power. The result: only other kids with similar t-shirts will acknowledge him in the street. His message is half-way lost. He doesn't really care because anyway 70% of the intended effect was directed towards the other kids, in order to build a political coolness. So only 30% is really lost. But another 25% was dedicated to the humanist/existentialist cause, that say that any form of commitment on a individual and symbolic basis is good (that's the principle of the democratic vote), no matter the immediate effect. So in the end there is only 5% really lost. Which must be about the percentage of blank votes during an election. Or what a supermarket looses because of theft. But the insurances make up for it. Actually the insurances make up for it up to 5% even if you only lost 2% - you will declare maximum lost.

So in the end you actually gain.But apart from what you gain, what is social value of it?

That is why the culture of political t-shirts has a lot to do with advertisement: how much can you gain in symbolic value from wearing a anti-war t-shirt? Sure you can lose a little - you can be arrested in a mall because it is "not a public space" and your ideas about war are hurting the corporate interest of the mall. But the insurances cover for it. You will be paid back in symbolic value by the diffusion of your face/name/story in the news. You establish a territory of soft activism, just like the kid maps the boundaries of his territory when walking down the streets of his neighborhood with his straight edge t-shirt.

The main idea of producing t-shirts is to work on the idea of slogan and of social sphere. The commercial idea of maximum effect is a powerful rhetorical tool that activist groups have taken into account to non-commercial ends. Both work on language as an impact, as an expressive means (i.e., in linguistic theory terms, that targets someone in order to make this someone react).

We wanted to reduplicate that phenomenon in a critical way by using the "detournement" method, that is, by trying to extract analytically the main features of the phenomenon and use them in a diverted way . The functionality of the culture will be more or less (that is what we want to know) modified.

1/ inventing a brand = designing a series of t-shirts that have a coherent (more than relevant) meaning that the express through striking images and words. Here the diversion consist in working on the idea of critical slogan.

2/ finding a space where to act. We have chosen to distribute our t-shirts for free or almost nothing in a thrift-store. The diversion here concerns 2 points:
a/ the core space is a supposedly neutral one: a thrift store is a space where you driven into by necessity or by the will of not getting into the logics of money-spending and/or brand-endorsing.
b/ the space will be used only in a temporary way. We still have to decide if we want to implement the technique of "buzzing" (= advertisement technique) by setting up a very visible stand where you can walk directly to to pick up an item, or if we will choose to remain invisible, by dispersing the t-shirt all around the store.

3/ mapping a territory of social reaction to the project. Each t-shirt will be tagged with an email address or a website url. The person who has bought the t-shirt and who has the internet (or who has the reflect of going on the internet) will be directed to our website. On this website the person will be welcomed by 2 questions: Where do you live? How do you react to the t-shirt design? This collected data will be processed in order to make a dynamic map, thanks to the software of Google Map API.