The Virtual Space Theory

Drinks are unique products. Within an instant of being consumed, they become an integral part of our bodies, and are capable of altering our perception of both our own selves and our environment. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that TV commercials for drinks often attempt to convey the experience the advertised drink provides using some kind of highly inventive virtual world. As the following videos demonstrate, this can be achieved in a whole range of different ways.

The first example is the now famous Coca-Cola commercial which proposes an unusual explanation for the unique taste of this drink. The taste we experience, according to it, is the result of a special treatment which each bottle receives whenever we purchase it. Thus, the vending machine – an otherwise mundane element of our urban environment – is presented here as a channel to a vast enchanted world dedicated to our drinking experience:

The second example advertises the Nespresso coffee capsules, following similar lines to that of the previous video (and possibly influenced by it). This time, however, instead of presenting the delivery of the drink, this commercial rather focuses on its production process: It proposes that its advertised coffee capsules of different tastes come from a magical world which harmoniously blends nature and industry in order to produce them. We may never be able to visit this world ourselves, but the taste of its products – as is hinted at – can give us the experience of somehow having done so:

The third example takes us to alcoholic drinks, starting with Guinness beer. The ‘other world’ which is suggested to us here is not that of the production of the drink or its delivery, but a world that lives and breathes right there within our immediate reach. This lively, dynamic, and exciting world, as this commercial proposes, is precisely what we are invited to incorporate in ourselves whenever we consume this drink:

The next example brings us to Smirnoff vodka, but instead of an outlandish world, the commercial proposes that this drink can transport us to places and situations taken straight from the movies. Using the bottle itself as a lens trough which to view the world, it becomes a portal to a sequence of action and adventure scenes which the drink can both deliver us to and save us from their dangers:

The final example brings us to Heineken beer, and unlike the previous examples, the world that it suggests taking us to is not some separate, magical or fictional world, but rather the very same physical world in which we live – but with a twist. Furthermore, it proposes that the effect of the advertised beer on our perception is so strong that just the desire and search for it is enough to transform the way we experience our normal environment:

Whichever your preferred drink or alternative world may be – cheers!

Can improbable and unexpected events take place in an otherwise ordinary city? Some TV commercials make their point by proposing precisely that. Following the previous post’s discussion of unlikely urban interventions, this post will instead focus on TV commercials which present unusual events that are set in regular urban environments. Such highly improbable events are presented either as the desired result of using the advertised product, or conversely, as a demonstration of the kind of problems that the product can help its customers deal with.

The first example presents a series of strange occurrences in a traditional Italian town. To the astonishment of its inhabitants, angels suddenly start falling from the sky, and they are in search of something. The beauty of the setting and its solemn traditions serve as a fitting counterpoint to the events presented in it and to the role of the advertised product in making them happen:

The second example presents a contemporary high-rise urban environment as it becomes filled with imaginary creatures and other objects that are made out of cut-out paper drawings. This mix of imagination and reality is metaphorically suggested to be precisely what its advertised brand can provide you with if you choose to use it too:

The following TV commercial uses an urban environment to present the kind of trouble that its advertised service can help its clients with. Financial problems, which are often represented through the use of statistical diagrams, here take the form of physical hazards that one can stumble upon anywhere in the city, in a whole range of unexpected ways:

The final example shows a city in which the improbable events presented in it are common to all of its inhabitants. The city may look otherwise normal to us, but the kinds of extreme events that take place in it are such that we would otherwise only see in movies – yet here they seem to be a normal way of life for everyone. In such a setting, then, the advertised product is presented as a successful solution for handling even such a demanding lifestyle as this one:

What is common to all the above examples is that despite the peculiarity of their various events, they all take place in otherwise regular urban environments. As TV commercials, the value of their advertised products is thus demonstrated through an optimized match of two contrasts: An improbable outlandish event, presented on the backdrop of its own corresponding stable environment.

What kind of urban experiences can TV commercials present beyond what we may normally come across? This series of posts on the architecture and spaces of TV commercials began with cases where wholly new worlds are created, and now continues with ones that involve rather regular urban environments – but with a twist. In such cases, a TV commercial presents an urban environment which is either reinterpreted or readjusted in an uncommon way, while suggesting that the advertised product is the magic factor that made it all possible.

The first example is somewhat related to the previous post’s discussion on car commercials, but this time advertising the Esso oil company. In this commercial, cars rushing along urban roads are at the center of attention, but it suggests a totally alternative approach to what is actually driving the cars:

The second example uses the approach of visual metaphor to advertise a service which is supposed to make urban life much smoother and easier for customers using it. This is demonstrated by the addition of a highly unlikely structure into the dense fabric of a city, combining interiors and exteriors in a wide variety of contexts, all made to cater to the personal needs of customers and the fun they can have using it – as well as to the fun we can have watching it.

The following example presents a series of interventions that are neither too complex nor too absurd to actually happen in the physical world. But what does make them unlikely, in this sense, is that these interventions took place precisely because they were part of the production of a TV commercial. It presents urban environments that are undergoing a transformation, and where the advertised product is directly what is making it happen:

The final example presents a whole series of urban interventions that propose to extend the experience of a city’s physical space altogether. In this case, it would be easier to discuss the commercial after seeing it:

This commercial builds on the centuries-old tradition of illusionism in painting: paintings that are made to seem as if what is painted in them is actually physically right there. In the terms of The Virtual Space Theory, such paintings create virtual places that are an immediate extension of the physical places in which the paintings are located. In this commercial, illusionism is now implemented at the level of dynamic images, and their powerful effect is demonstrated in the various urban locations which they redefine.

The unlikelihood of such an attempt succeeding, however, serves precisely the point of this commercial: to propose that its advertised product somehow holds in it the magic that artists – and observers – have been seeking for centuries. It might be an unprecedented product, and it is surely a fun as well as unusual urban intervention, but whether such attempts can ever fully succeed is at the heart of the discussion of my book “The Architecture of Virtual Space”.

TV commercials (including viral videos for that matter) can provide interesting examples for discussion in this blog, and this post is the first in a series that will explore various aspects of this topic. When a combination of imaginative agencies, creative talent, daring clients, and substantial production budgets occurs, the result can be the creation of fascinating virtual worlds that serve to promote a certain product or brand.

Car commercials represent a particular type of commercial that may involve the creation of inventive worlds. One of the ways to evoke a desirable image of a car is to show the kinds of environments that such a car can handle: challenging, varied, fascinating – suggesting that you would be able to explore them yourself if only you buy the advertised car.

The first example is a commercial for the Citroen C5, which shows the range of road and weather conditions it can handle by presenting the landscape it drives through as made of a series of huge domino blocks. Each such domino block consists of a different type of landscape in a different season, yet they all fall perfectly into place just as the car is about to cross over from one to the other:

The next example follows the same approach of showing the variety of road conditions the car can handle – this time a Land Rover – but expresses it in a very different way. Instead of making the impossible look realistic, the whole world it presents is made of continuously transforming clay. As the car rides along, the road, houses, landscape, trees, animals, and people playfully shift form to create ever new environments:

An alternative approach occasionally used in the making of car commercials is to use the car parts as raw elements from which to create something entirely new. In the following Subaru commercial, this approach is mixed with that of inventing new worlds, resulting in the creation of a virtual world which is made up of car parts – including the buildings, roads, water, plants, and animals – while the car itself is hardly ever seen, but rather implied:

The final example, advertising a Honda motorcycle this time, makes a conscious reference to the car commercial approaches discussed in this post. Thus, instead of trying to create a convincing new world, it invites us to witness the construction of an illusion of such a world – suggesting a stop-motion animation of a continuously changing wall painting surrounding a parked motorcycle:

A TV commercial that aired recently is yet another good example of the irrelevance of the popular notion of trying to determine what’s real in pictorial images:

This commercial’s success in creating a buzz, apart from its considerable humor, wit, and boldness, comes from the fact that it also sparks a discussion among its viewers regarding the inevitable question “How did they do that?” or, more specifically, “Is it real?” As already discussed in two earlier posts, the answer will challenge our notion of what’s real once again.

Among the many events that are packed into this commercial, I would like to focus on its continuous transition between three locations: a bathroom, a boat deck, and a beach. According to The Virtual Space Theory, since we see all these places through a pictorial image, they are all virtual places in virtual space – regardless of whether they might have an equivalent in the physical world or not. Therefore, in such a context, one part of the question “Is it real?” is whether these virtual places truly reflect physical places in the physical world, or whether they were computer-generated. The other part of that question is whether the visual transition between such physical places indeed happened while the commercial was shot, or whether it was stitched together after filming.

The answer is that – apart from the transformation of objects in the actor’s hand – everything you see happened in front of the camera in one shot: this whole commercial was filmed in a single physical location. Its production crew built a section of a full-scale boat on a beach, along with a mock-up of a bathroom suspended from above by a crane, as well as a hidden mechanical system for sliding the actor onto the back of a horse. These were then all set in motion as the camera was rolling, and after three days of repeated shooting, they finally managed to get it all to work properly in one continuous sequence (you can check it out for yourself in an interview with the people who created it).

What this means, in popular terminology, is that “Yes, it’s all real!” And yet, there’s a catch. If we expand our notion of what’s real by just a bit, we realize that to seriously consider what we see in this commercial as being real is actually quite absurd. Even though the places we see in this commercial do exist in the physical world, the beach is the only one of them that is real. The bathroom has a physical existence, but it is not a real bathroom – it has a missing wall, and it is not part of any real house. The boat has a physical existence, but is not a real boat either – it is only half-built, and it can neither float nor sail.

The point is that what actually interests us in watching this commercial is not to see bathroom mock-ups hovering over half-boats, but to observe a virtual world where a man can seamlessly switch locations to match his mood and speech. Our curiosity may make us wonder how it was made in the physical world, but only because we were charmed by what we saw in virtual space. Therefore, in that sense, the only real bathroom, real boat, real beach, and real transition between them are the virtual bathroom, virtual boat, and virtual beach in virtual space – as seen in the virtual world of this TV commercial.

Film stars do not necessarily always have to be actors – they can also be places. Paris and New York, for example, are very popular film stars, having appeared in countless films. Usually the film role of such places is to just ‘act’ as themselves, though sometimes they can play a different ‘character’, such as in the example of Berlin which was mentioned in a previous post.

In some rare cases, even a single house or a building can be a film star. This is the case of the Ennis House in Los Angeles, which was designed and completed in 1924 by Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s prominent 20th-century architect. Its most famous film appearance is as Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). In the film, this hilltop house assumes the role of a futuristic 97th-floor apartment:

This example demonstrates one of the design approaches taken by filmmakers for creating virtual places: redefining a physical place. In other words, a film is shot in an already existing physical place, possibly with some local modifications to suit the needs of the film. More importantly, it is then presented in a context which makes it appear like another place altogether. Technically, such as in the case of the Ennis House, the production process may also involve a stage-set version of the house, which eases design modifications as well as the placement of lighting and cameras. And yet the principle remains the same: a new virtual place in a film has been created based on an existing physical place.

The Ennis House has also starred in a long list of other films, TV commercials, and music videos, and has assumed various roles. Over the years, however, it became such an iconic film star house, that – similar to some human film stars – its real value is no longer just in its ability to act, but simply in ‘gracing the screen with its presence’. In the examples that follow, then, the house is presented unchanged, starring mostly in the role of its own self – Hollywood’s uninhabited film star house.

A series of TV commercials for Obsession by Calvin Klein, directed by David Lynch:

Music videos for Ricky Martin’s song Vuelve, and S Club 7’s song Have You Ever (and no, these videos do not represent my musical taste ):