Myranda Escamilla doesn't know exactly why she collages animal skulls, but her work dwells on life, death, and our culture’s disconnect from the wild. 

A little over a year ago, Myranda Escamilla walked into an antique shop in Port Isabel, Texas, a beach town near her home in Brownsville. Inside, she happened upon two deer skulls that have altered her work as an artist—and likely her life as well.

“My intrigue with skulls came from seeing my father collect them when I was a child,” she explained in an email. “He tried his hardest to keep most activities outdoors. Although admittedly I could never appreciate our adventures at the time, I now miss the fragrant smells of nature—the beach mist, dry and wet sand, young trees, their sap and the feel of flower petals running through my fingers. 

The stillness and calm it brings is overwhelming in the best way. Life is dull when it is spent mostly inside, encased and enclosed. The erratic nature of wildlife as opposed to our way of living—as humans, with our emails and texts, faxes, game boys, and laptops—is mysterious, beautiful, boundless, and colorful.”

Escamilla accepted the skulls “as they were—blank and natural,” but was intrigued by the thought of changing them. “How could I alter an already interesting and beautiful specimen to make it more beautiful? I was challenged and that was enough to prompt me to take my wallet out. And so they went home with me.”

She embellished the first skull with small cuts in a napkin, the second she painted to look distressed, “as if it was being reborn or taking on a new soul.” Over time, her collages have become increasingly intricate.

When asked where the impulse to collage animal skulls comes from, at first she can’t explain. “It just happens and perhaps it is my subconscious, but if that is the case I cannot help but ask—what is it saying, what does it mean? Those questions drive me nuts. I do not think about it often and I try not to ... too knotty.”

But when I admit that they first struck me as a reminder of the way humans have sought—and in many instances found—ways to control the natural world, that I find her skulls both beautiful and ominous, she has more to say.

“I suppose the skulls can be something of a reminder of what has been lost and what should be held near our hearts. Many times, I have obtained skulls that were either going to be thrown away or left outside to wither. In adding ‘a human touch’ I am ultimately giving it a piece of myself, honoring its forgotten existence, if you will.

“Perhaps they seem ominous and haunting because they are in fact, no longer living. We tend to associate skulls with death, the macabre, fear and the unknown. Death strikes immense curiosity in me, I cannot fathom it—how we live and live and live and then ... all is gone. What should you make of your life if it is bound to cease at any moment?

“Working with skulls helps me to become more comfortable with the inevitable final stage of life, to accept it. The juxtaposition presented by the skulls is so striking because you are instantly caught between life and death.” 

After news reports and books raised awareness about the link between commodities trading and starvation, food justice advocates took action and big bank Barclays responded.  

This morning I opened my email to a note from journalist Fred Kaufman that read, “Yes, a book can make a difference!” Attached was a report that Barclays, a large UK bank, had announced that they would stop trading in food derivatives markets.

This was good news. Fred and I had spoken last fall about his new book, Bet the Farm, which exposed the connection between agricultural derivatives markets and price spikes on staples like wheat—with impacts around the world ranging from starvation to riots. In the interview, I picked his brain on topics from deregulation in commodities markets to what everyday people can do to stop unethical trading schemes. I wrote about it all in “Spinning Wheat into Gold,” but one big takeaway was that rallies and political action are going to be the most successful way to get banks to change and to get tougher governmental regulations back. Looks like he was right.

After activist campaigns in the UK raised awareness about the human cost of speculation on food, Barclays chief Antony Jenkins announced today that the bank would stop doing it, writes Miriam Ross for the World Development Movement.

Until now, Barclays has been the UK’s biggest bank to buy and sell on the food derivatives market. While the bank’s agreement to end such trading is a victory, one campaigner with the World Development Movement emphasized that it is not enough for banks to opt out of agricultural commodities markets. There must be increased regulation so that they don’t start again.

Here in the states—where wheat speculation was born and the commodities index was invented—we have yet to see a strong movement emerge to end such trading.

Image: Street theatre at a Barclays protest rally, photo by World Development Group. 

If you’re the kind who ventures out on foot after dark, you’ve almost certainly noticed a hypnotic blue glow flashing inside windows throughout the neighborhood. And when you see people held captive by a box of moving light, you can’t help but think that humans seem complicit in their own capture—even if you’re no stranger to a great episode of Planet Earth or Arrested Development yourself. Does it matter whether they’re watching American Idol, Mad Men, or Real Housewives?

For decades, people have worried that television and movies would take away the public’s agency, the collective drive to do anything but work and buy things advertised on TV. It’s a justifiable fear. People do seem pretty entrenched in a lifestyle that revolves around working, eating, and watching TV.

Of course, there’s also a history of resistance to this prescribed lifestyle, and not just among academics. Ray Bradbury wrote his 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451,to caution against “the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids.” In 1967, Timothy Leary urged a gathering of 30,000 hippies to “turn on, tune in, drop out” (a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan). Such messages urged audiences to avoid a lifestyle of shallow entertainment and consumption in favor of unmediated experience and action toward positive change.

But money has a way of rendering its critics useless. Now the hippies’ peace sign is converted into profits at big box stores, where workers are underpaid and money is funneled to warmongering presidents. And the purchase of a tie-die rainbow dress from a popular bohemian concept shop might well further the career of a dogmatist politician. From hippie to hipster, attempts at cultural overhaul have been bought, sold, and used against those trying to change the system. What’s a rebel to do?

Some have attempted to fight fire with fire. While punks, hip-hop kids, and culture jammers didn’t invent the art of the remix, they popularized it. On the surface, remixing seems pretty innocent. Take a sample of culture—an instrumental hook, an image, or word from a magazine—cut, paste, and make it your own. Most memes (and their variants) do this for a laugh, but it can be seen as an act of defiance. Those who remix refuse to passively consume. They insist on answering the nebulous assertions of mass media, however small their voices may be. It’s a fine line, though, between remix and copyright infringement.

Enter Anonymous. The group has emerged as a leader in defense of democratic control of information  threatened by corporate copyright and money’s influence on Capitol Hill. Anonymous understands the value of open-source culture and has fought to protect it. In its own gesture of sampling, the group turned a mask worn by the fictional protagonist in V for Vendetta into a real-world icon of rebellion. The mask has a complex history of evolving meaning, explains Molly Sauter on HiLobrow, beginning with Guy Fawkes’ involvement in a failed plot to assassinate King James in 1605. Though Fawkes was killed, his legend lived on through folk tradition, a comic book series, and that series’ Hollywood film adaptation. The popularity of the Guy Fawkes mask sold in costume shops post-film was waning when an internet forum playfully revived it to serve as the face of Epic Fail Guy, “a stick figure who failed at everything,” writes Sauter. “It’s unclear whether this association had anything to do with the historical story of Guy Fawkes (whose Gunpowder Plot was, in fact, an EPIC FAIL), or whether it was due simply to the marketing blitz for V for Vendetta. Either way, the initial popularity of the mask within the Anonymous community was directly due to its association with Epic Fail Guy, and only indirectly (if at all) to political sympathy with either the historical Guy Fawkes or V for Vendetta.”

When Anonymous began its sidewalk protest of the Church of Scientology, the mask was worn mockingly to expose the religion as an “epic fail,” suggests Sauter. However, as Anonymous’ actions gained recognition, offline embrace of the mask caused its meaning to shift again:

“The symbolism of the mask itself, adopted by anti-authoritarian protesters from [Occupy Wall Street] to the Arab Spring, seems to have reverted to more closely embody the meaning in the V for Vendetta comics and film. Rather than overtly mocking those targeted by the protesters, the mask (an anarchic folk hero with a smile and curved mustache) serves as a political identifier. The wearer is identified as anti-authoritarian, a member of an online generation that values the freedom of communication and assembly that the internet has so powerfully enabled.”

The meaning of the mask was influenced by many, but controlled by none. It became a sign, a word in the language of resistance. Far from simple imitation, this transformation seems to have happened almost by chance.

Though the mask signifies rebellion, it has not escaped the constructs of copyright and consumption. Nick Bilton of The New York Times points out that every time a mask is purchased, protesters strengthen one of the world’s largest media companies, Time Warner. There is no denying this claim, but Bilton misses the point. Rather than inventing a new icon of resistance, which would in time be packaged for the masses and sold à la peace signs, Che Guevara, and the Obey Giant, protesters have reclaimed an item that media companies had rendered all but meaningless. It’s a product, sure, but it gives dissidents something no advertisement sells: temporary anonymity. In freeing its wearers from identity, the mask also frees them from their individuality, allowing them to be subsumed, for a fearless moment, by a greater cause. It’s almost the reverse of Bilton’s argument—critics of corrupt capitalist practices have found a way to exploit the system, which distributes the face of their protest.

The Guy Fawkes mask is not the only example of this leap from mass media to the streets. In an article for Guernica Rebecca Solnit wrote that a friend arrested at an Occupy protest had posted“Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome,” in a status update on Facebook. “In this way,” writes Solnit, “do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph […].” It seems people are expanding the vocabulary of the 99 percent, and symbols spread wide by mass media make for a convenient starting point.

The messages contained within film, television, and books inevitably infiltrate public thought and discussion. The more aware we are of their influence, the more control we have over it. In the hands of engaged audiences, mass media have the potential to contribute to a broad language of protest. By using the internet and streets as a public forum, people create and change this language, and the gap between citizen and consumer narrows. Rebellion can be co-opted by consumerism, but the reverse might also be true.

Images, top to bottom: "televisión lado A" by Ángel Raúl Ravelo Rodríguez licensed under Creative Commons; Epic Fail Guy; Anonymous crop, from a 2008 photo with Graham Berry at the Hamburg conference on Scientology, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Sand rises around the Great Wall of China in a 2007 Diesel ad. Text in the upper right corner reads "global warming ready." 

Perhaps by now you’ve heard that Perrier, the sparkling water company, has come up with a way to fix climate change. Ring the bells. Bang the drums.

You’re probably wondering what the idea is. Are the people of Perrier campaigning to end subsidies to oil companies worldwide?

No.

Are they encouraging people to drive less, buy less stuff, and stop pillaging Planet Earth?

Ha!

More recycling?

Please.

The company’s plan is to send a lithe young woman into space to pour some sparkling water on the sun. Yes. That’s the plan.

Well, OK, not seriously—but they made a commercial about it. Because the sun is the problem, and putting it out is the solution.

Earth to Perrier, it’s 2012 calling. The record setting heat-waves, droughts, fires, and storms are only going to get worse. No one knows exactly what will happen but people generally agree that there will be disruptions to our supplies of food and water, not to mention changes to our habitats. There will be other consequences we haven’t predicted. Climate change isn’t a marketing gimmick, and shouldn’t be used as way to sell more stuff.

Because global warming is caused by general overconsumption, most advertising makes climate change worse, if indirectly. It’s not just that we drive too much and fly too much (though we do), it’s that everything we buy comes to us at cost to the planet. That includes sparkling water. It’s not that an advertisement like this is actually more harmful than any other ad, it’s just unforgivably irreverent.

Of course, Perrier is not the first to do this. Italian clothing brand Diesel offered a series of “Global Warming Ready” print ads in 2007. The ads featured young, wealthy–looking white people in post-climate-change settings around the world. Parrots have taken the place of pigeons at St. Mark’s Square in Venice. The Great Wall of China is half-covered in sand. Jungle wildlife encroaches on the Eiffel Tower and at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln’s nose is barely above water. The roofs of skyscrapers have become islands in Manhattan.

It doesn’t look so bad, really. I mean, if climate change is all about hanging out on rooftop beaches and looking fabulous, count me in. I’ll spend every last penny on high-end clothes and sparkling water. I’ll call it stocking up.

The strange thing is, as audacious as these ads seem, they’re also soothing. “Everything will be fine,” they whisper. “Buy more stuff.”

If the cause of climate-changing emissions is overconsumption—of fuel but also of products—then advertisements are a big part of the problem. Perrier and Diesel are not the sole offenders, but the last thing we need is reassurance that altered, extreme climates will be tolerable with new clothes and bottled water.

I questioned writing this post for a couple of reasons. First, I’m extending the reach of the ad to people who may have chosen to live outside advertising’s reach. People who don’t want to be manipulated into buying things. People who don’t want to waste time and energy chasing material goods beyond basic needs. Second, it would be very easy to derail my argument like so: Now here’s a person who takes everything too seriously. Can’t we just sit back at the end of a long, hard workday and watch TV? Advertising is just that, advertising. It doesn’t actually affect anyone. It’s not so bad, watching this imaginative commercial, with rich colors and beautiful people and a lovely sense of resolution. It makes me happy … and thirsty.  

It may be true that I have no sense of humor, but in a situation this grave, why should I? Our government is not responding to dangerous levels of pollution. Our president couldn’t be bothered to attend Rio+20. A group of children sued the Environmental Protection Agency for neglecting to protect the atmosphere, and the case was dismissed by a U.S. District Judge who claimed it was out of his jurisdiction. Our legislators are too busy collecting bribes from Big Oil and Big Industry to create policies that would make sustainability economically attractive.

This is a failure of leadership and a failure of the market. We must respond by making climate change a high priority within the culture. That does not start with soothing advertisements from companies trying to make a dollar before the unpredictable rises up around us.