Electric Josh

Performance artists/guerilla advertisers hold a ridiculously wonderful press conference.
[permalink ]

So most of the car transportation in the fair town in which I work was shut down the other day to allow bomb squads to investigate/neutralize what my colleague claims were described by the famously speech-impaired mayor, to my great delight, as "several suspicious bombs." They turned out to be magnetic LED signs with an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character. Three things:

• I'm completely conflicted about whether this kind of advertising is any good in general. Compared with the annoying crap that blinks on the TV it's great, so anything that reduces blinking TV junk is good. But perhaps it might have been wise to avoid sticking these things on actual infrastructure.
• Clearly the Boston Police (and the Coast Guard and whatever paramilitary or security outfits were involved) don't employ stoned college kids, who would have identified the Aqua Teen characters, nor do they employ folks who read boingboing (I thought everyone read boingboing! It's in the sidebar, right?) or makeblog, who would have immediately identified these things as magnetic LED signs. Apparently, the NYC police do.
• Might be good to be a bit less paranoid about terrorism. Now "the terrorists" know how to shut down the city of Boston for about twenty bucks in parts. Even if these things were bombs, a better response would have been to just go about our days as normal, like they do in London.

As for me, I'm just glad I live on the hopelessly uncool South Shore, where there are no cool kids to market this stuff to: my commute was completely unaffected. Twenty minutes as usual.

Links: Boingboing link #1, link #2, the Globe, and here are the artist's flickr page, his website, and here's a video of the things being installed:

I refuse, of course, to link to the local TV stations' coverage of all of this; they tend to operate in constant hysteria mode even when nothing at all has happened, I can only imagine what they're doing with this story.

Update: The press conference the two defendants held sounds excellent!
[permalink ]