Marketing has long been something of an art form in itself. From the vintage marketing posters on kitchen walls to the ever inventive production of the music video- things that were originally artefacts of advertising are now seen to be artefacts in their own right.
The natural progression surely is for an entire campaign to become a piece of art, a modern installation spread across it's different aspects but perhaps coming together to bring a greater message, a message beyond the usual 'buy this stuff'.
Aphex Twin put out a press release, of sorts, today announcing his new album. It follows
a blimp seen flying over London at the weekend and stencils appearing in New York Back before social media these would only have been seen by a few people and forgotten, maybe made the print run of NME magazine the following Friday.
Once they might have gone unreported, not now. So long as one person who knew what that mysterious symbol meant saw it, or even saw the quizzical Instagram posts from those who didn’t, it was going to be reported on. Information spreads very fast, getting to those who can interpret its importance when it often would not have some years ago.
Then, came this tweet:
It’s a web address, but it won’t work with a normal browser. The .onion signifies that it lives on the largely untrackable ‘deep web’, which can only be accessed by a specialised ‘Tor’ browser. Of course you need to know what ‘.onion’ means, but with thousands of retweets it was moments before someone with the necessary background knowledge did. Head over there and you get the track list for the forthcoming album as well as a whole load of gibberish information.
It seems someone did their homework, and noticed that Warp records registered a very similar domain name on the ‘standard’ (shallow?) web recently, which contains the same site.
Except it doesn’t- because you access it using a normal web browser it reflects back at you all of the information you are giving away about yourself, the information anyone who owns a website you visits can see, record and track.
What operating system you use, your internet service provider, the IP that can be used to locate you geographically (to an extent), all the plugins you use on your browser, and other identifiers which when put together can track where you go and what you do online are all revealed on the page. The for site doesn’t do that, it tries to but the nature of the technology you use to access it hides all this information from the site and its owners.
It’s a great PR campaign to get even more intrigue going about one of the most hotly anticipated records in many years. It’s also got to be some kind of art installation, a commentary on how we use this technology. It’s going to raise awareness of Tor, and the kind of information that you do and don’t give away when you surf the web in different ways. It's going to get people asking questions. Questions well beyond wondering whether the new product is as good as it looks and where they can get it. Questions that are raised by a piece of art.
I wonder what comes next?
