Doors of Perception 4   S P E E D   - S P E A K E R   T R A N S C R I P T -

Tom Klinkowstein: JFK.com

Air Travel used to be exotic, stylish and memorable, but became commonplace, boring and tedious. One purpose of a 'Virtual Airport' might be to recapture the allure of this earlier air travel experience, updated for the 21st century through ''Superbranding' of the airport, and placing the entire experience in the new context of the Web.

Superbranding involves not a product, but a process. An attitude. With Superbranding, the image and process are the end product, not just a badge.

We don't reflect Culture, We ARE Culture. The Net extends and amplifies Superbranding to a parallel virtual universe inhabited by the blurring of experience, commerce, community and distance.

In the Net, anything can co-exist and compete alongside anything else at anytime. A sportswear company, a government agency, a 10-year-old student, they all exist in the same space of the Web.

We thought about our own airport, JFK, and took apart the history and cultural place of its name to find a new meaning, one which could be turned into a Superbrand for a virtual airport on the Web.

  • JFK the person,
  • JFK the pop icon,
  • JFK the airport,
  • JFK, the Superbrand, with it's own tag-line:

'The Difference Between Where You Are and Where You Want to Be'

The Airport is transformed into the departure point for an exotic 21st century life-attitude, reclaiming the elan of the contemporary. Not the jet-set but the Web-set.

Community with a vengeance, and transactions of the non-explicit.
A place that's always just beginning, with runways which never stop being built.
Not Place, but Pace.
A culture connected by attitude and not by geography.
Hypermediated and hypersonic.
Enhancing and extending the brand of the airport as a cultural facility.
- As Marshall McLuhan said, 'airports will be the universities of the future'. But this time, they will be immaterial, riding the crest of ATTITUDE. Not learning, but leaning.

Virtual Airports...with their own fashions, their own system for finding people, as easily as tracking a FedEx package, their own guide to a virtual city with all its complexity, loudness and beauty. And their own liver-than-life Superchats. No zones, No time.

They're the daughters and sons of the super-nerds who hacked code all night and ate cold Pizza for breakfast in the morning. They love to be lagged. Famous for 15 Web pages.

  • The airport as point of departure.
  • The airport as destination,
  • The airport as event,
  • The airport as attitude.
  • The airport as superbrand.

Not VR (virtual reality), but, ER (extreme reality).'The Difference Between Where You Are and Where You Want to Be'

 

updated 1996
url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION
editor@doorsofperception.com