Swoosh Time: Nike's Art of Speed Advertizing Campaign and the Blogosphere (Report‪)‬

The 'problem of time' is conjectured to "become to the twenty-first century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs" (Shaw & Weibel 562). This paper, while sharing such a conviction, focuses on what I define as the 'dromology of consumption' (1) by discussing Nike's Art of Speed ad campaign. In May 2004 Gawker media designed a blog micro-site for Nike to promote the project, which consisted of a short film series showing 15 digital artists' interpretation of the concept of speed. Web logs (better known as blogs) are beginning to surface as part of the marketing landscape and the campaign represented an interesting new approach to blog advertising. This paper discusses the impact of the contemporary culture of acceleration on the phenomenon of Internet branding, and engages with the interaction of commercialism and art in the context of today's new media practices. The short films produced by the 15 digital artists who were commissioned to create their own visions of speed through a "Nike lens" (to quote from the Gawker blog) are contrasted with the discourse of speed developed by the Australian artist David Noonan. In Noonan's videos, speed has been voided of competition or a useful end. These are never ending races, infinite loops without a winner, in which speed becomes almost hypnotic, to the point where it reaches its limit: inertia. Swoosh Time