Outernet, you remember, is the big new building outside Tottenham Court Road station. It's cavernous and gold and covered in screens. There are screens inside and outside. There is no escape from the screens. It's a commercial hellscape funded by capitalism. It's a vacuous deception purporting to be art. It's a blazing inner city intrusion. It's a shareable experience reliant on gullible consumers. It's a dystopian window into the future. It's what happens when you allow marketing departments to determine the function of architecture. It's a platform for meaningless PR-driven emptiness. It's private corporations overwhelming the public realm. It's an attention-seeking pustule. It's vacuous buzzphrases writ large. It's ad-based cultural engineering on a grand scale. If you are in any way to blame for the creation of this monstrosity or the curation of its visual feed then take a serious look at yourself and your priorities because you are the hellspawn of modern society. You could have built anything on this prime site but you chose to deliver this giant two-fingered digital beacon, and if it burned down tomorrow I for one would stand alongside and applaud. If I have failed to fully express how much I despise this building, my apologies.
The little immersive chamber at Outernet has been open for some months and now the big chamber is too.
You just walk in off the street, they pull back the barriers at ground level around lunchtime and then anyone can wander in, the escalators up from the tube station literally funnel people towards the entrance. They want you to come inside lured by the pretty lights, come and see what this electronic flytrap is, it's like some evil cottage in a fairytale updated for the modern age. There are even benches to sit on, they want you to stay in here for as long as possible, it's all about maximising the number of eyeball minutes. Vibrant swirling designs are the best, they maximise the chance you'll whip out your phone and share an image, better still a video. Look here I am, look here I am with my grinning friends, look here we all are in front of all these pretty colours. And see how the sponsor's name slips into the background behind you but you won't see it because you're too busy posing, because every last penny of this is about the company paying to be better recognised, and you grinning muppets happily do all the hard work for them.
I was expecting the chamber to be bigger.
They have a programme for what they show. You might arrive during actual art or you might arrive during an advertisement masquerading as art. I arrived during an hour-long advert for paracetamol dressed up as the 'Room To Breathe Experience' in which a pink orb glowed and the brand name hovered in the bottom left hand corner to make sure you got the subliminal message. Allegedly this is a "free mindfulness experience", for which read 'meaningless bolx', and "in partnership with", for which read 'sponsored by'. I discovered later that it "combines music, soothing visuals and rhythmic breathing exercises to evoke a more relaxed state of mind and body offering visitors a mindful moment of release", whereas nobody in the room was doing that and the music was neither loud nor evocative and nobody would want to sit around in this weather letting this wash over them and if it released anyone's stress that was more by luck than design. When you buy the sponsor's pain relief tablets a fraction of your money goes to pay the marketing department and quite frankly they should have sacked the lot of them and sold the tablets cheaper. Apparently these are the world's largest LED screens, well what a waste of the world's largest LED screens is all I can say.
There are huge adverts outside as well as inside.
While you're interacting with this brave new world look around you and see how many security guys are keeping an eye on things. They can't have you misusing this immersive brand theatre they've spent so much on creating, there might be reputational damage, so behave yourself and don't do anything a lawyer wouldn't do. These days a lot of London is pseudo-public space owned and controlled by developers - their rules, their choices - and we wander amongst it solely because they allow us. They've already come for our streetscapes but now they want to 'activate' the upper levels too and shout their promotional messages via pixels in the sky on any surface the planning authorities will let them. It's what's behind the recent proposal to increase the screen size at Piccadilly Circus, it's the reason for the inexorable spread of animated billboards beside busy roads and it's the entire raison d'être for that godforsaken spherical concert hall they want to build beside Stratford station which'll spew forth illuminated adverts across its entire surface day and night. Outernet is just a warning from the future that one day all culture may be as unavoidably empty as this, but only if we let the bastards win.
