As a creative director, I find that my best projects are rarely constrained too tightly by their initial concepts. The design and production processes reveal too many valuable insights not to adjust course along the way. The HACKER RITUAL was an extreme example of such a journey.
In 2012, we knew that we wanted to pay homage to the unexpected masses of Chilean fans who played our 2009 alternate reality game,
Junko Junsui. So we decided to travel half way around the world from our New York studio to Santiago and cast three local actors in the roles of fanatical student fan, "in game" characters.
Inspired in my storyboards by the ritualistic vignettes of Chilean director,
Alejandro Jodorowsky, I decided that our characters needed to trek deep into the
world's driest desert and do a fiery fertility ritual alongside a
giant statue of a hand. Shot by my infinitely talented cinematographer friend,
Frej Hedenberg and location produced by advertising veteran,
Jose Latuf, it was a well executed visual piece.
What happened next was even more interesting...
In order to demonstrate the power of our immersive narrative browser extension, ALFA-CIPHER — a piece of software that literally let us inject fictional content into ANY third party website, from the
Gingrich 2012 Presidential Campaign to
Great Britain's MI6 spy agency — we knew we needed a big spectacle.
So we took our ritual footage from Chile and made it part of a randomized, programmatic "hack" of 100 different corporate brand pages on Facebook (including the Bank of America one shown above). To do this required the very adept programming skills of my partner,
Stan Wiechers. Stan used a variety of programatic color filters, text field insertions, different div element transformations, and pulled from a large list of YouTube bizarre videos to create a highly disturbing instance of the page which changed every time.
In order to trigger the hack, players just had to post on the comments of a target Facebook page. It was a risky but totally legal publicity move, since our software only altered the content of the sites
after it was received by the browser. Also helping us to spread the word,
Julian Assange tweeted and gave the link to our "fake" WikiLeaks mirror where players could download our extension software.
