Camouflage is easy in nature. All you have to do is dress according to the colors of the surrounding environment.
If you wear military camouflage (rather in fashion today) you can cross an entire forest without being noticed. But how can you disguise yourself inside a supermarket? This is the question that Yvonne Bayer and Sabine Keric – Communication Design students at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany – have tried to answer through their guerrilla art project.
The choice of a supermarket as the ideal venue for this experiment was suggested by the fact that it is a clean, orderly environment where people do not expect anything unordinary to happen. Also, there are large quantities of all types of goods on display, sometimes in stacks. This is the ideal situation for good camouflage.
The disguised person “enters” the goods on display by camouflaging himself/herself with these goods, totally disappearing for a second, and then resurfacing, causing the most diverse reactions.
Sales personnel were amused by this “provocation”... the supermarket’s managers not so much, since they had not been informed before hand. Customers reacted in different ways: some were entertained, others irritated, and still others were totally indifferent.
Camouflage was of three types: colored paper, cardboard boxes and plastic bags.
But the experiment continues and if next time you go to the supermarket andsee goods moving... it means that guerilla art has struck again!