From a treasure-trove of semiotic fun found by Peterme and Andrew Zolli:

“We know that as an agrarian society could be represented via the conventions of the landscape – so too were the industrial era and the modern era. But how might we begin to conceive of the era that has been variously referred to as hypermodern, postmodern, supermodern, global, or turbo-capitalist? What landscapes can we turn to here for enlightenment and deconstruction? We offer television advertising as a source of landscape images to study. What can be said about how Capital conceptualizes spaces as landscapes in its advertising?”

It also remarks on Monking – a name I’ve tended to give to the practice of inserting Tibetan / Oriental / Zen Buddhist monks into fictions and images to signify that something timeless and wierd and other is goin’ down. Alias was guilty of this, as was Tomb-Raider#1: the narrative played on – no real dependence on the monks or their beliefs other than to give a backdrop of kindly enlightenment – a thin Zen-eer atop the story if you like…

“An orange-robed Tibetan monk – currently the numero uno universal signifier of knowledge in the information age (the use of the monk as a signifier is similar to how the green-eyed tree frog was used to signify the environmental movement in advertising) — is joined to the word “knowledge.”

» Landscapes of Global Capital: The Infolightenment