September 13, 2005
Where-Next
Betting on Terror
"The best day to launch this project was undoubtedly September 11th. The fake institutional tears flowed for the lukewarm memory commemorated a human disaster with a careful selection of morbid images, made to sow the same mediatic terror celebrated in the 'special sections' in the printed and tv media after the main terroristick attacks of the last years. A nodal point of this insane process is the prediction of the next attack, based on many rumours and experts' analisys.
The project Where-next is turning this mechanism over its advocates. It's a game born from the strategic partnership between the Guerrigliamarketing.it and Molleindustria groups. It consists of betting on the next attack, guessing time, place and typology, using the Google Maps API. The game combines two extreme aspects of the contemporary reality: the global legitimation of bets as a tecnique to guess and change our personal future, and the uncertainty caused by terrorist attacks, unbearably amplified by mass media). The authors have constructed this disturbing hybrid, ready to deceive the most incompetent journalists.
On the other side, the game will force everybody else to reflect on how a formalization of the massacre play, ruled by the media on every tragic occasion, trough an online game is triggering complex reactions on the users. In this way the official sources are delegitimized on telling us how the future reality will be made, and then we can repossess the reality imaginery thanks to a sarcastic and playful form. The end result is that the induced terror is played down to an exhilarating game, and the latent panic (as a western contemporary mandatory component) is definitively broken down in pieces." From neural.it.
Posted by jo at September 13, 2005 11:22 AM
