In August an invitation arrived from Swatch.
Not a printed card in an envelope: A red ball with black dots. And a strip of paper that said “Swatch Interactive Billboard @ Greenbelt 5, 6 p.m. Wear dots.”
If there’s anything Pinoys love, it’s dress codes. Seriously, if office meetings required people to show up in outfits of a specific design, everyone would be clamoring to go. Tell them “business attire” and they’re falling asleep on their feet, but say “polka dots” and they’re raiding their closets and running to the mall. We like dressing up.
Pinoys are also very big on polka dots. To us polka dots equal suerte (luck), which is why on New Year’s Eve we’re all decked out in dots and eating round fruits like grapes.
So I went to the closet to get my one dotted shirt, white with raised white dots like braille. It wasn’t there. It was in the laundry. I didn’t have any clothes with dots! How could I go? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!
At the mall I found a scarf with polka dots. That would have to do. Note that I had no idea what the event I was attending was all about: I just fixated on the dots.
Properly dotted, I went off to Greenbelt and realized that I did not know where the Swatch Interactive Billboard was. When you hear “billboard” you imagine a large two-dimensional elevated surface along the highway, preferably festooned with six-pack abs. This billboard is even better than that. (Incredible but true.)
When Tita Virgie Ramos says “interactive,” you bet it’s interactive. The Swatch Interactive Billboard is in super 3D: You walk right into it, play with the exhibits, pose for photographs, and hang out in a different dimension for a bit. For the Swatch Dot Collection party the Interactive Billboard was a literal dot outbreak: every surface was covered in dots. There were dominoes, hula hoops, billiard tables, pachinko
It was dizzying interactive 3D — 4D if you could imagine connecting every dot and opening a portal to a Dot Matrix universe ... I’ll stop now.
The Swatch Interactive Billboard is the first and only one of its kind in the world — Tita Virgie convinced the Swiss head office to let her open it in lieu of the regular street billboards that would feature the company’s international models. Her idea is to draw the audience into the billboard so that they are the model. And if you know anything about Pinoys, you can see the idea is brilliant.
The guests posed among the dots, took their pictures, and starred in their own Swatch billboards. They took the hula hoop challenge: Who could do the hula hoop longest? And they tried to guess the total number of dots in the Swatch Interactive Billboard. Whoever submitted the answer closest to the actual total would win a Swatch.
Public response was amazing. People spent hours literally counting the dots: the contest brought out the obsessive-compulsive in everyone. It’s not easy to count so many dots — if you can’t mark the ones you’ve already counted you lose your place and eventually, your mind. The contest went online, and a couple of hours later there were 1,000 entries and counting.
So to celebrate having made hundreds of people walk around a room muttering to themselves, Swatch threw another party for the Final Countdown on Sept. 14. And invited friends from the media and entertainment industries to help add up the total.
You know how on Oscar night the host introduces the accountants who tallied the Academy members’ ballots and certified that the reckoning was correct? We were those suits. Think of us as the Commission on Elections ... on second thought, don’t.
Every dot in the Swatch Interactive Billboard was numbered, a sight to gladden the heart of accountants everywhere. The final dot was numbered by Tita Virgie herself: 8,118, a lovely palindromic figure, dots and stripes, as someone pointed out.
What have we learned from all this? We have learned that if you engage the audience, they will go a little dotty.