Fake No Underwear Subway Ride

The New Yorker performance artists Improv Everywhere are doing it again. This time they don’t intend to fool the by standing audience (or only to a second degree), but us behind-the-screeners who usually laugh at the others‘ expenses. Done very smoothly: to fake the real you just need to pixelate what could be scandalous  or otherwise sensitive (here: the exposed genitals), a process well known from TV news and censorship. The obscure pretends to be real, plus the expected shocked or amused faces of the by standers contextualize this properly. An easily achieved but perfect hoax (since the artists all wear skin colored underwear, to be shown this Monday) which rises the question about the real and the virtual in our game culture in general, where game and virtuality blur into the physical worlds and vice versa.