Giant hand engages people on the street

October 23, 2009 by Dave Haynes

Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

If you are all about engagement, this is right up your street. It’s not a commercial entity but an art installation running on BBC UK LED boards. This video is from the streets of Liverpool, where it ran for a few days last month. Now it is running on a board in Cardiff.

The work is all scripted and automated so that a giant hand tickles, pokes and removes people who stray into the live camera’s viewer. The guy behind it is London-based artist and designer Chris O’Shea.  

I like this sort of thing because it’s a people-stopper and gets viewers talking and laughing. The commercial extension of this is pretty obvious, though it would need to get moved around to different boards because the novelty shelf-life would be short. The other challenge in a big public setting is that you need to be on the screen pretty much all the time, which means if it is advertising, it is the ONLY advertising.

Which means it will cost BIG to pull this off.