When Your Visual Field is Sixty Percent Ads

This isn’t interactive advertising, but rather a uniquely interactive way of looking at advertising.

The “City Wipeout” project highlights the degree to which urban dwellers’ visual fields are dominated by commercial messages of all kinds. Architect and researcher Pasi Kolhonen created the installation, which allows users to wipe a series of images clean of all visual material that is not an ad. The resulting images remain extremely cluttered. From the site:

“Kolhonen wants to reveal with his City Wipeout installation just how many images, texts and signs we find in our everyday environment. The installation consists of pictures which unveil an ordinary face of the city centre. The pictures are reflected one-by-one on the wall. The user interface allows the spectators to wipe the view clean of everything but the advertisements, signs or logos. All that remains is the blanket of advertising that covers the entire city. That blanket is not always noticed although it is constantly present in our daily life.”