Posts matching tags 'revisionism'
2005/4/13
It has emerged that the Tory candidate for Dorset South had put a doctored photograph of himself at a rally on a pamphlet, completely changing the meaning of the signs he was holding:
Only a month ago Mr Matts lent his support to the local Kachepa family, who were threatened with deportation. A photograph taken at the time showed Mr Matts in a crowd of local supporters holding up a photo of the family, with veteran Tory MP Ann Widdecombe by his side holding a placard saying "let them stay".
One month on, an altered version of the photo appeared on Mr Matt's election leaflets. Mr Matt holds a sign saying "controlled immigration", while Ms Widdecombe's says "not chaos and inhumanity".
2005/3/13
France's National Library has photoshopped a cigarette out of a photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre used in a poster to promote the centenary of his birth. The action was apparently taken to comply with a law prohibiting tobacco advertising, and follows the editing out of cigarettes from other likenesses of role models. Perhaps they should edit all those removed cigarettes into images of historical villains like Hitler (or, even better, images of people considered passé and unhip though not enough to be in danger of becoming Ironically Cool). (via bOING bOING)
2004/5/11
Recently, claims have been coming to light that a lot of exotic inventions really came from Britain; first we had the mediæval English origins of curry, and the Scottish origins of the Afro-American musical tradition. And now a popular history author wants to add the boomerang to the list of British inventions, on the strength of rock carvings in the West Yorkshire moors depicting four-armed boomerangs. (Mainstream archæologists, however, believe that the swastika-like design was merely a common motif in Greek and Roman mythology.) Do you suppose that the contemporary two-armed design came about to make them more compact and easier to ship from England to Australia?
(Hmmm; someone should do up "historical" boomerangs made of brass or porcelain or somesuch and adorned with British imperial designs; lions, cannon, Union Flags, and such, which, in this alternate universe, could have been issued to British explorers.)
2003/1/23
Poster companies in the US have attracted criticism for sanitising a poster of The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover, removing a cigarette from Paul McCartney's hand. This was done without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records.
2003/1/22
A scholarly work by two Russian mathematicians positing a new chronology for British and European history, and seemingly proving that Britain didn't exist, and all references to it map to places in eastern Europe and the Balkans. "London" referred to either Constantinople or a Bulgarian town named Tyrnovo, England (or Albion) was Albania, Scotland was Scythia, the Welsh were Turks, and the Norman Conquest was actually a reference to fourth crusade and the conquest of Constantinople. The conspiracy of cartographers strikes again, so it seems.
(If this is true, and these things didn't happen in British history, then what did? Perhaps the Royal Family is actually descended from Odin (as their official genealogy is said to claim), or perhaps the Queen is a giant lizard?) (via Psychoceramics)
2001/9/11
Researchers at Glasgow University have found that advertisements can alter your memory, making you "remember" happy childhood memories, associated with a brand, which never actually happened:
One root beer manufacturer, Stewart's, had discovered that many adults appeared to remember growing up drinking their product from bottles. This was impossible since the company only began full-scale distribution 10 years ago. Before that, Stewart's root beer was available only from soda fountains. However, the bottles were adorned with slogans such as "original", "old fashioned" and "since 1924", which conjured up images of times gone by.
2000/6/23
The technology for electronically faking video footage is coming to fruition. And we all know how the street finds its own uses for new technologies...
A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot. The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along. Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up.
Suddenly those large stretches of programming between commercials-the actual show, that is-become available for billions of dollars worth of primetime advertising. PVI's demo tape, for instance, includes a scene in which a Microsoft Windows box appears-virtually, of course-on the shelf of Frasier Crane's studio. This kind of product placement could become more and more important as new video recording technologies such as TiVo and RePlayTV give viewers more power to edit out commercials.
With just a few minutes of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person's mouth-area looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds. Drawing from the resulting library of "visemes" makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream up-including utterances that the subject wouldn't be caught dead saying. In one test application, computer scientist Christoph Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created "animations" of Kennedy's mouth saying things he never said, among them, "I never met Forrest Gump."