Imagine yourself asleep as a staggering earthquake crumbles your home, waking nonplussed to the sound of impending collapse because your earthquake-proof bed is about to trap you safely into a specially armored oversized coffin stashed with MRE’s and bottled water. This amazing concept demonstration video has been sitting on a barely active youtube channel for almost 3 weeks, and has within 24 hours of this post started circulating in just about any blog that talks tech or is regionally earthquake prone. I haven’t found a single article questioning this video’s authenticity despite it being off-the-charts uncanny. There’s too much polish and style to be an independent designer’s first effort, the incongruously-chill dub music seems too cool to be professional, and the horrible reality of living with is device looming over you every earthquakeless night is more unsettling than reassuring. Bloggers are falling in line clickbaiting this video, lazily rewriting other blogger’s articles which describe Wang as a 66 year old Chinese retiree, but few of them cite back to the ChinaDaily article from 2010 which contains the only original information about the supposed creator. It’s a wild guess, but these videos remind me so much of the french arts collective Pleix that I immediately assumed it was a planted viral video of their doing. Dating back at least 13 years, Pleix has been crafting spooky satirical promos with gorgeous graphic expertise scored by hip electronic music, just like the “ Lit anti-séiseme”. Their output contains some of my favorite creative video work ever, much of it etched into my brain from re-watching, especially their music videos for Plaid’s “Itsu” and Vitalic’s “Poney part 1″, and their video shorts “E-Baby”, “Simone”, and “Beauty Kit”. Pleix’s involvement is a very specific hypothesis, but I’m certain this is a hoax video. Maybe the real creators will emerge after maximum virality is reached, but they could just as likely leave us guessing to achieve a complete artistic statement without context. Maybe I’m the asshole and this is the real deal by some dynamo engineer with well meaning but misguided intentions? I’m open to all possibilities.
I’ve found a copy of the video with sound effects and more dramatic music uploaded by another seemingly unaffiliated youtube account under the title of “He developed the bed that protects earthquakes”. It was posted two days before the dub-scored video, so the video was possibly stolen and fit with new audio. In either case these uploaders have nonsense on their channels, why would they have first access to these demos?
