Keb Cerda OOTD Project

Keb Cerda "OOTD" Projecct

An acronym which stands for “Outfit of the Day,” the phrase has recently become a ubiquitous tag in social media and fashion blogs, indexing clothing and apparel brands and celebrating the entire culture of its consumption. When adopted to a collection of visual artworks that transform ethnographic records of highland peoples into a parody of fashion photography and advertisements through a mobile application, all the more the layers of meanings and associations resonate with the intersections plotted by the artist in this latest project he had embarked on—the intersections of ethnography, consumer society, and virtual technology.

Keb Cerda presents two sets of imagery: the first one being faithful reproductions of old ethnographic photos of the mountain peoples of the Philippines; the second, on the other hand, shows different fashion articles reminiscent of print advertisements. The two sets are linked through the use of a mobile-based application called Omniscope, which merges the images in the two sets of works and reveals texts composed of parodied brand names. In this process, peoples often construed as traditional and primitive enter the realm of the hip and the cool, the flashy and trendy, and become a curious visual presence in the consumerist and global market system.