The web exhibition portion of, OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding, is up and available for viewing by anyone with an internet connection here at http://www.branding-democracy.org/?q=node/63. The full description of the online portion of the show is below.
An interesting paradox informs the online works of OURS. Network culture has given us new challenges to our civil liberties—illegal government surveillance, increased censorship, retrograde copyright enforcement, linguistic hegemony—and, at the same time, provided us with new tools for combating these challenges. The question of branding is a perfect point of entry for such an enterprise. What is branding if not a highly-mediated, visually-based form of communication whose rhetorical and psychological impacts are just as precisely calculated as the military’s psychological operations (PSYOPs)? The Internet makes the “source code” of these missives transparent and editable. Taking this DIY political aesthetic into their own hands, the Web-based works in OURS reflect on contemporary politics—whether it is the state of things in the U.S. or abroad.
The description for the online portion of the show I believe is rather accurate and powerful. The usage of branding in a networked online space as a tool for challenging hegemony is and has been critical to the creation of The Neighborhood Network Watch. In addition the project was designed to yield the largest psychological effect upon its audience by making use of language, methodologies, and tactics typically reserved for the government and the military. The co-opting of these tactics and techniques should not be taboo but rather they should be embraced by activists and artists and used to their fullest potentials especially in the times we currently are and have been in.