![]() The ‘modernity project’ focuses around ideas of liberty, plurality and individual autonomy. Warner (1994) has suggested that there are two main discourses of modernity: the discourse of Liberation and the discourse of Disciplinization. Why do we feel caged in the modern world? Semiotically looking at what the ‘ birdcage’ as a type of cage means in Modern western culture – this is primarily by decoding its use in advertising.Looking more broadly at the cage from a psychological and historical perspective.While the goal was to ‘source innovative and exciting ideas to temporarily transform our City laneways with engaging artworks and inspiring ideas’, this juxtaposition appears to be evoking the exact opposite – caged life and an absence of freedom or naturalness in the city. it’s interesting to reflect on a recent installation art piece in Sydney, Australia, where birdcages were hung as part of a street-scape art project. The use of the birdcage is not limited to advertising. I’ll explore some other advertisements further in, but it is surprisingly easy to find examples of the ‘cage’ as an advertising metaphor reflecting that not being ‘caged’ is both resonant and motivating. Merrell’s ‘Let’s Get Outside’ – if only bills were wings… They both revolve around the idea of freedom firstly, there is the iconic Harley Davidson campaign ‘Live Cage Free’. If brands reflect back our dreams, aspirations and fears, perhaps a quick look at two campaigns for leading brands might be informative here. “A shopping cart flipped upside down forms a cage that I use to protect myself from consumerism.” Being one of the masses, within the condensed nature of city-living results in direct comparisons to things we cage in order to express how they feel about their lives: ‘I feel like a rat in a maze’, ‘we’re stacked like battery hens in my apartment block’ or ‘cities are getting crowded, we’re like sardines in a can’. This is not to suggest that everything they think about city life is negative, but that the compounding effects of struggling to maintain individuality and a sense of independence amongst so many people results in some consistencies in urban experiences. ![]() If you do any type of qualitative projective work with people that live in cities, you get similar analogies and metaphors peppering their language, in how they talk about living in cities or moving through them. This is a cage-less design for the animals (although we walk into a cage to see them). While this has centralised viewing similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Prison, it doesn’t evoke the ‘always observed’ nature that that design intended or the lack of natural environment that many contemporary zoos have. ![]() The end point of my last post the new Danish Zoo, Zootopia was a concluding observation –in some ways it is a reversal of the traditional zoo model. ![]() I was interested in ‘rats in a maze’ across the last two posts I’ve made as an analogy that people use to explain modern living. Furthermore, looking at how we semiotically use the birdcage in communication from a psychological perspective to explore the cage as a container-metaphor that forms how we think.įor anyone that read my last post on our love/hate relationships with cities, they might see a continuation of thinking here. However, in order to understand the ‘birdcage’ we also need to understand the broader context of cages in society. The focus of this investigation is primarily how we use the birdcage motif in modern western culture. It’s a remarkably culturally pervasive symbol and it’s easy to draw many transcultural and historical comparisons. Moving from when we lived in hunter-gatherer societies until ultimately we took it with us into new urban environments. The birdcage as a symbol and metaphor has been used across many human cultures. ![]()
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