Retail Therapy

NY-based design agency GHaVisualAgency creates a lush multi-screen video wallpaper 'Nokia in Wonderland' (also click on the 'Multiscreen Version' for the true experience) for the Nokia flagship store. The screens in these stores display some surprisingly abstract work and has developed an interesting approach to environmental media in a branded commercial space, featuring work by other newmedia design heavies HiRes, Tomato, Universal Everything, and others. But GHava are my friends and they did some cool Supernature-ish video so I'm pimping them here. Word.
Like other flagship retail locations (Prada, Comme des Garcons, Samsung et al) the keyword is experience design and the idea is less about selling Product and more about Brand-as-Lifestyle. Problematics aside, from a critical perspective this concept points in an interesting way to the convergence of diffuse fields such as architecture, media, marketing, and product design, and baldly demands of us, the consumer, a kind of tribal allegiance to certain market forces which our participation in a techno-savvy culture demands...like in the novel Snow Crash, in which any abstract organization of business activity operates as an independent nation state: the Mafia, Chinatown, religious cults, McDonald's...Nokia?