Your Smartphone Could Explode at Any Moment at a New Museum Exhibit About Land Mine Awareness
NEW YORK — I was walking through the New Museum on Friday morning, admiring the portrait work of photographer Marco Grob, when my smartphone buzzed and informed me that I had been blown to smithereens.
I had stepped on and detonated a VS-50 anti-personnel land mine, the notification said. The VS-50 is a small, plastic land mine, which plagues the landscape of Afghanistan, and which is notoriously difficult for minesweepers to detect, I learned from my phone. Now, one had exploded under me, here on the seventh floor of a museum in the Lower East Side. It had maimed me at best, and killed me and several bystanders at worst.
This grisly notification system is part of a one-day exhibit called “Sweeper” at the New Museum in New York City, part of the United Nations’ first-ever International Mine Awareness Day. Dreamed up by the digital marketing agency Critical Mass, Sweeper seeks to simulate the pervasive danger of land mines that residents of Sudan, Myanmar, Cambodia, and several other countries face daily; to raise awareness of the epidemic here in the land mine-free United States; and to solicit funds for the difficult and expensive mine-clearing mission that continues around the world.
The exhibit exists on two experiential planes. The first is visual: Critical Mass commissioned Grob, the photographer whose work I had been admiring when I was first blown up, to travel around the world and to photograph victims of land mines and IEDs. Those stark, haunting portraits of the paralyzed and incapacitated are positioned around the room, as are select disabled explosives that the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) has cleared throughout the years. These physical documents are further reminders of what is a distant horror for most Americans.
Mines and IEDs cleared by UNMAS, as well as several photos by Grob. (Critical Mass)
Fairly traditional day at the museum, right? Well, Critical Mass has also transformed the room into a digital space, using the smartphone and an accompanying app to more directly drive home the terror and uncertainty of living within constant threat of land mines.
To do so, the team dotted the room with hidden, virtual “mines”; each mine was represented by an iBeacon, a Bluetooth-powered physical sensor that can trigger an action on a smartphone when the phone is near. Each museum-goer downloads an app (iOS or Android), plugs in his headphones, and then walks around, without any knowledge or hints of the location of those mines. If you and your smartphone get too close to one of the iBeacons, an explosion is triggered. Your phone turns red, you hear a small boom, and then a screen pops up providing information about the explosive device that killed you: its identity, how much it costs to build, where the device is often found, and the demographics of its victims.
It’s a chilling experience, and an effectively haunting integration of art, technology, and activism. The explosions come often; I never walked more than seven steps without dying. At first, I thought this was a frustrating flaw of the exhibit, not being able to move naturally through the room without an interruption, but I came to view it as a powerful form of frustration, one that nags at your intellect and conscience with your every step. At Sweeper, to walk is to know for certain that you are going to step on a land mine.
Each time you die at the exhibit, you are prompted to donate money to the UNMAS mission via text message. Contemplating your luck and mortality, and considering the tortured portraits of land mine victims, you’ll be hard-pressed not to send $5.
Critical Mass Chief Creative Officer Conor Brady told me that the entire exhibit, soup to nuts, was planned and put up in just six weeks. Because of that shortened timeframe, the exhibit suffered somewhat. While the app and photography were effective, the logistics could have been better. The exhibit lasted only one day, due to the difficulties of finding and renting a venue: Critical Mass is considering new spaces for Sweeper, lengthening its run beyond International Mine Awareness Day. Brady also said that the company had considered holding Sweeper outside, to more accurately simulate the reality of land mines. (New York City representatives balked at allowing a bomb simulation — even a virtual one — to exist in the heart of Manhattan.)
Both sound like swell ideas, frankly. This is an innovative, compelling museum exhibit that should appeal to more than just the New York art-geek crowd.
Until Sweeper finds a more permanent home, you can download and maneuver around the app (sans the iBeacon land mines) at GetSweeper.com. And you can learn more about International Mine Awareness Day at the United Nations website.
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