The forthcoming album from Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero, is being promoted ahead of time by a fairly complex alternate reality game that describes a world in the near future wrecked by terrorist attacks and overbearing responses by the West in response. It talks of drugged water supplies, Orwellian surveillance, banned books and music and of a mysterious object repeatedly seen by many and only known as the “Presence”. It’s all utterly fantastic and has been a lot of fun to see it developing.
The first clue came from the back of a Nine Inch Nails tour t-shirt where certain letters were brighter than others. They spelt out the words “I Am Trying To Believe”. This led to the first discovery, iamtryingtobelieve.com. Following flyer handouts at Nine Inch Nails gigs, leaked USB keys, clues in the video for the first single from the album and numerous other leads a detailed story is emerging of the world of “Year Zero”, 2022, virtually unrecognisable from today, but still unmistakably a place we could end up. The ultimate story so far is that the websites and messages sent to us today have been sent from the future by sympathetic scientists working for a quantum encryption laboratory in order to let us avoid their fate.
At one recent gig, a flyer was handed out with an address in Shoreditch on it. Investigation found a big billboard had been taken over by the Year Zero crew and a couple of photos cropped up of it. I went along to visit it today and took some detailed pics and put them on Flickr. The billboard itself yielded another website, operationswamp0000.net which gave the world of 2022 some British context. Just next door to this billboard, as a bonus, is a subvertisment featuring Mickey Mouse by none other than James Cauty – he who burned a million pounds, he of KLF, and fantastic stamps.
For the full run down on the Year Zero viral, your best bet is the NINWiki. Most of the investigative stuff is being conducted via the forums at Echoing The Sound.
0 Responses to “Nine Inch Nails viral hits London”