2017 was beginning to present itself as a bad year for Shai Lebeouf. Fresh off the back of a 4th consecutive failure, and after selling only 1 ticket to his new film, Man Down, in the UK in April, Shai LeBeouf went off the rails. Determined not to let 4chan get the better of him, he turned to an isolated part of Finland in the hope of continuing his project in peace.
In the first part of this look at 4chans epic game of capture the flag we saw Shias project move from a wall in New York to a wall in Albuquerque. After safety concerns it relocated to a rural part of Tennessee, finally ending up in Liverpool, UK.
SEASON 5
LOCATION: A cabin somewhere in Lapland, Finland
DATE: 04/12/2017
The swift removal of the project by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool had yet again left the art project homeless. Realizing that putting the flag in a public place, in a busy city, wasn't the safest thing to do Shia relocated the project to a remote part of Finland. Severally underestimating 4chans ability to fuck with people, Shia and his 2 fellow artists and collaborators, Rönkkö & Turner, went to live in a log cabin from which they lived streamed themselves from for a month to an art gallery in Helsinki.
Unseemingly bothered by the lack of evidence to the cabins whereabouts 4chan went ahead in trying to locate them anyway. First they looked at the speed of internet connections and signal strength in Lapland hoping they could narrow the position of the cabins down, but quickly found Finland has pretty good coverage all over. Next they moved onto looking at log cabin rentals.
With only some wood paneling and the top of a chair to work with 4chan set about trawling through a ton of wood cabin rental websites in Lapland looking to match the wood in the promotional pictures to the wood that appears in the cabin of Shia's live stream. Within a few hours they had a likely match. Narrowing the location down further by checking the booking dates of the cabins confirmed it was indeed the ones Shia and his 2 friends were staying in.
Shortly after Shias cabin was located the livestream from the gallery was heavily DDOSed and eventually taken offline completely. Although the stream from Shias cabin to the gallery was still live, 4chan marked this up as another victory.
SEASON 6
LOCATION: Luke Turners house
DATE: 07/18/2017
For a brief time a HWNDU flag was hung in the home of one of the artists involved in the project, British artist Luke Turner. This was until a few days later someone found out the name of the street his house was on. One anon waited until night time and then went around shining a blue light through windows in the area until it could be seen on the live stream.
Once the location of the flag was confirmed the project didn't continue much further, and after monitoring some of the ideas anons were posting on 4chan Shia and his gang decided to remove the flag and shutdown the stream. The game was over. For now.
SEASON 7
CAPTURE THE FLAG - PART 3
LOCATION: le lieu unique, Nantes
DATE: 10/16/2017
Season 7 has so far proven to be a little more difficult. Atop a tower at 'le lieu unique', a contemporary arts and music venue in Nantes, France, the flag has so far been impossible to get. Nonetheless since mid October the anons of 4chan have been working tirelessly to capture/destroy the flag and maintain their success.
Initially 4chan came up with some of their usual funny, clever, and elaborate plans.
But as the days went on one idea kept coming back to them. A drone with a flame thrower. So that's exactly what they did, as seen in this incredibly ballsy video below.
2 months in and 4chan still haven't given up. Going by past seasons this one is going to be equally spectacular. To keep up to date with the latest from France you can check out the HWNDU 4chan Twitter here, and the live stream of the flag here.
