Flier, Flier, Pants on Fire

Old School Guerrilla Marketing a.k.a. Conceptual Art

Part 1: Ballad of the Lost Roomba

One of my not-so-secret passions is playing on contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence. The following is a case study of a project that anticipated some of the current media flashpoints, successfully encouraged audience engagement, and eventually was collected in a Dutch art book. Because that’s how this shit works, right?

I once owned a Roomba, iRobot’s flagship robot vacuum technology, which would wander around my flat at random hours. One night, while sharing a bottle of wine with my (now) wife and collaborator, Kary Hess, it occurred to us that the Roomba might try to escape one day. Or, what if it wandered off like an adventuresome pet? The Lost Roomba premise was born.

Naturally, we needed to create a flier with a direct call-to-action to engage the viewer. But we also wanted to suggest a creepy narrative undercurrent to reward those who dove deeper.

We created “Gil's Roomba Hotline” using the Burner app for iPhone. We analyzed the avai…