Swoosh, spoof, suit

Riffing on Nike's tendency to buy up local real estate and slap its swoosh and name all over it, the European art collective 0100101110101101.org has created a convincingly authentic faux-Nike website, Nike Ground. As Carrie McLaren of Stay Free! writes, the site portrays

the company as real-estate vultures who buy streets and squares in cities around the world in order to rename them and install giant monuments of the swoosh. The site looks and feels so much like a Nike site that even the savviest web surfers should be forgiven for missing the point. But if ambiguity makes for a muddy message, it also insures that Nike will take note, and indeed -- Phil Knight et al. have issued a 30-page injunction demanding the immediate removal of material related to copyrighted material.

Here's hoping that Nike Ground gets a ton of publicity for this and
spurs much-needed discussions about the corporate takeover of public
space.

More at Rhizome.