Made You Look: Moments of encounter with [ambient] advertising in everyday places

This project explores how people encounter ambient advertising as they go about their daily lives. These disruptive, entangled, and contextually-rich media communications are a playful invitation to engage.

They make us look,
pause for a moment in the flow of our lives
and make something from the encounter.

It is the relational nature of ambient advertising, always in the milieu, always tied to context, that sparked my question - how and in what ways do participants encounter, and give attention to, ambient advertising in everyday places? The research is informed by multiple voices, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sara Ahmed and Kristadel McGregor, describing how we inhabit the world. It traces ideas of time through Yi-Fu Tuan, Kitaro Nishida, and Henry Bergson. It explores the construction of ambient advertising through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It touches the world through the action research of Jean McNiff and sensory ethnomethods of Sarah Pink, the participant encounters recorded on lapel cameras, through photo-voice and micro-interviews. In turn these methods provide ‘intimate histories’ of not only encounters with ambient advertising but with ‘how we live with a variety of media’ (Morley, 2006). The research design allows a place for subjectivity, reflectivity and reflexivity through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) and practice based thinkering through desktop film (Kiss, 2021), using creative methods to get closer to a creative encounter.