Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The youth wants more urban, interactive and creative ways of amusement

What Banksy started as a prank on Paris Hilton's last music CD has become a participatory distributed art movement that anyone can do: shopdropping ( or 'reverse shoplifting' as some define it). From the shopdropping.net web:

"SHOPDROPPING
is an ongoing project in which I alter the packaging of canned goods and then shopdrop the items back onto grocery store shelves. I replace the packaging with labels created using my photographs. The shopdropped works act as a series of art objects that people can purchase from the grocery store. Because the barcodes and price tags are left intact purchasing the cans before they are discovered and removed is possible. In one instance the shopdropped cans were even restocked to a new aisle based on the barcode information."
Another example of urban amusement: The guys at Blast Theory created another hybrid urban virtual game few years ago that became quite popular at multimedia festivals around the world: Can you see me now?

And the latest and most popular one: "Improv Everywhere"'s Frozen Grand Central in the middle of NYC

Now that the city is the urban playground for all these modern activities, how traditional providers of amusement will react to that? Will we see a distributed Walt Disney embedded in the city?

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