The Living Room Candidate - An online archive of more than 300 campaign commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image. "In a media-saturated environment in which news, opinions, and entertainment surround us all day on our television sets, computers, and cell phones, the television commercial remains the one area where presidential candidates have complete control over their images. Television commercials use all the tools of fiction filmmaking, including script, visuals, editing, and performance, to distill a candidate's major campaign themes into a few powerful images. Ads elicit emotional reactions, inspiring support for a candidate or raising doubts about his opponent. While commercials reflect the styles and techniques of the times in which they were made, the fundamental strategies and messages have tended to remain the same over the years."
Monday October 6: Two events organized by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies - Tonight, in conjunction with the exhibition "Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures," CAVS will present a tour with designer Damon Rich at 5:30 followed by a "Roundtable on the Mortgage Crisis" at 7:30 with Margaret Crawford (Harvard Graduate School of Design), Lynn Fisher (MIT Center for Real Estate), Richard Healey (Grassroots Policy Project), Phil Thompson (MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning), moderated by Damon Rich.
