The 7th annual Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Conference will be held in Santa Monica, California on October 11-12th. AR/VR experts from all over the world will gather to discuss important trends and innovations that are shaping our digital future.
This is a narrative about symbols and how they lose their significance when they are not generally understood.
Consider the new gorilla sculpture on Wall Street, a 7-foot-tall bronze figure challenging the long-standing Charging Bull monument (meant as a Capitalist emblem) now surrounded by 10,000 bananas.
In brackets:
According to Market Watch, the bananas “illustrate exactly how ‘bananas’ Wall Street has gotten,” according to a notice at the location. But here’s the thing: there’s a catch. You’ll need a separate sign to convey a symbol if you don’t want to explain it.
And here’s something else. The expression “go bananas” can only be used to the gorilla if that is what they consume. Gorillas eat “leaves, vegetative stuff, and nothing else,” according to Primates Park, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the monkey world. Bananas aren’t even given to monkeys in zoos.
By the way, the bananas will be given to local food banks and community refrigerators, in case you were wondering.
“A simple act of offering a banana promotes community,” Ankit Bhatia, a co-founder of Sapien.Network, the company that placed the gorilla statue, told NBC New York. We need to come together as a society.” An unexpected image of kumbaya is a fearsome behemoth of a gorilla fighting off the Charging Bull.
On Monday, a 7-foot-tall bronze gorilla statue and 10,000 bananas were set in front of Wall Street’s Charging Bull “as a representation of the absurd wealth discrepancy between the 1% and the rest.” https://t.co/vTlPplmW1V
October 19, 2021 — MarketWatch (@MarketWatch)
Organize a competition
Another sculpture has already faced up against a charging Bull. Fearless Girl, a sculpture of a defiantly poised girl that urged for more women in high management, was created in 2017.
However, a tiny girl with her feet spread wide apart and her hands on her hips looked more like a moppet refusing to go to bed than a workplace with gender diversity.
After the Charging Bull artist, Arturo Di Modica, claimed that the angry-looking imp was put under the cover of darkness and that he didn’t have authorization to be on the street with his artwork, Fearless Girl was relocated to the New York Stock Exchange.
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Bill Di Blasio, the mayor of New York at the time, was sympathetic to Fearless Girl’s message and arranged for the move.
A tyke performing the rallying seemed ludicrous, given that the Fearless Girl theme was a rallying call for gender diversity on Wall Street. The sculpture was accompanied by a placard that said, “SHE makes a difference,” which added to the hilarity. Who is it, the kid?
Come on!
I’ll return to the gorilla statue shortly. There’s something more to be said about confronting Fearless Girl with Charging Bull, and it has something to do with what the gorilla statue is doing today.
I’m thinking of Giuseppe Moretti’s work Lygia and the Bull, which portrays a naked woman on her back with a steer roped to her. The sculpture was meant for Philadelphia, but it was purchased by circus entrepreneur John Ringling for the façade of his Florida museum.
Warfare between gorillas
Charging Bull, like Lygia and the Bull, is a symbol of animosity and a bad omen for Wall Street. The gorilla statue looks to be angry as well. As it turns out, the animosity is more than meets the eye.
Harambe, a gorilla that resided at a Cincinnati zoo and assaulted a toddler who invaded his area in 2016, is the inspiration for the sculpture. Harambe, who was assassinated, is a horrific metaphor for a world that has to come together.
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