Blog Prompt: Havidol
PLEASE ANSWER BY POSTING COMMENTS.
Discuss your reaction to "Havidol" by artist Justine Cooper.
http://havidol.com
What do you think Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder is? What is the artist Justine Cooper critiquing? Why do you believe she has created such a convincingly real web site - and how does that impact her message?
From what I saw looking at the website, the artist seems to make up a disorder that almost all people suffer from. The disorder DSACDAD is basically the need to fill your life with material possessions and achievements in order to feel important or special. Justine is playing on two aspects of our society, one being the need to feel important through goods and the other being the supposed "pill for everything". By that, I mean there is basically a pill for every ailment, which seems to be true now a days. I thought the website was beautifully ironic and designed to look like every pill website.
ReplyDeleteI particularly like how the name started to make more sense as I explored the site. Havidol= have it all
ReplyDeleteWith this incredibly realistic website, she is critiquing our culture of quick fixes, self diagnosis and consumerism/attention seeking. It's important that the site looks realistic because it may even have the ability to convince some who stumble upon it that it's real and they have DSACDAD, especially in our culture, where many attempt to self diagnose mental illness.
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ReplyDeleteFrom what I gathered from the website, I think DSACDAD is a normal symptom that everyone got through. The website was just designed to make the viewer feel like something is wrong with them. I took the test and the way it was worded is to make you feel like you took it wrong if you didn't have a certain score, trying to say that you need to be diagnosed. It's interesting. If you didn't know it was fake, it could get into a hypochondriacs mind.
ReplyDeleteI also took the test and it really makes you feel like something is wrong with you. I think the artist wants to show that people often think someting is wrong with them and that they want some kind of medication for everyting.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the Havidol site, and it did an excellent job of making you feel like something is wrong. The test did an excellent job of making it seem natural to self-diagnose and I loved the little bits of humor here and there. DSACDAD I think is just being busy, and not having the time to sit and relax, which makes taking a pill for it even more wild.
ReplyDeleteAt first glance I thought the website looked good but as I read I imediatly saw through it and saw the make believe for the "disorder." As I was taking the quiz the questions just seemed like, "here answer these, they won't matter but you know answer them so you can feel like it reflects you. Yet it would be easy to see how it connects to the modern people wanting to have a medication for any "problem" they may have even if its not real.
ReplyDeleteThe broad range of feelings/symptoms associated with DSACDAD seems like emotions experienced naturally over the span of a persons life. It'd be impossible to avoid "worrying about life" or 'noticing signs of aging." People naturally experience different forms of distress, its a normal reaction to life. This is o course an aspect of life that one would want to avoid if possible. People have been trying to avoid the inevitable since the beginning of time. Many companies have also exploited this fact. This site mimics over the counter drugs that supposedly help symptoms that could be better cured with time or therapy. There's ads that look exactly like this site on tv every day, and the sites obviously a critique on that. This site was made to look realistic likely to expose how easy it is to manipulate a consumer into thinking they need medication for something common or mundane.
ReplyDelete