Digital Debris

Embodiment, digital games & technology in Education

Appropriating Location

While pervasive games, the urban dérive, parkour, urbex and flash mobs may all be strategies for subverting and experiencing public spaces in different ways, the establishment is never slow to appropriate these very same tools. 

Here's an example of site-specific guerilla advertising that is very much in tune with these ideas. It uses street theatre, triggered by a button in the same way you might change channels on your TV with the remote, and prompting the same blaze of gunfire, action, sex and drama that we are used to viewing on our screens. For a brief moment it generates a hybrid world in which onlookers, in a clear state of cognitive and emotional dissonance, become participant observers in a fictional spectacle beyond their control.