United Colours
of the Upgraded Youth

I’m Gary Alake Riley—a multidisciplinary artist, art director, and lecturer.
I’ve worked across design and branding for companies including the BBC, Disney, Lego, Edelman UK, The Wellcome Trust/Collection, and Kantar (WPP). Now, through B3 Media’s Creative Catalyst program, and drawn from City Limits, a 2D live-action Sci-Fi animation series idea I’ve created, I’m developing Neon Billboard, an immersive project where my experience in branding and graphics meets my interest in how media, technology, fashion, Pop, and youth culture shape society.

Concept image: Neon Billboard: Unboxed, VR interior interactive brand lifestyle and product screens.

Neon Billboard plays out in two formats:

1) Neon Billboard: Unboxed—an XR/VR experience developed as part of a British Underground submission to SXSW 2026 in Austin.

2) Neon Billboard: Outernet—a large-scale screen installation, initially played at London’s Outernet Now Building and designed to tour locally and internationally.

Both experiences present themselves as a slick, immersive fashion x tech brand campaign seducing viewers with hypnotic advertising and youth-centered visuals.

Concept image: Neon Billboard: Unboxed, VR exterior sneaker box design.

Immersed in a believable contemporary digital Ad. campaign, participants are urged to upgrade their wants and emotions. The pitch is smooth and recognisable — advertising at its most persuasive. Yet beneath the gloss and engineered FOMO, the undertone is authoritarian, urgent, and very seductive.

Those in the experience should ask:
Is this where we’re heading? Or have we already arrived?;
The ‘Cyber-Yoot™’ = identity sold, belonging commodified, youth culture, counterculture, and consumer culture fused into a single adolescent, branded entity, and trademarked being.

Some inside the experience won’t notice the shift…

Concept image: Neon Billboard video installation.

Yoot is a British vernacular word for “youth”, born in street culture, with Jamaican roots, and in this XR experience is a word co-opted and repackaged as the end product. This shift from grassroots slang to commercial asset mirrors how the language, style, and identity of youth tribes are often redrawn and resold to the very group who invented the term in the first place. In Neon Billboard, I use “Cyber-Yoot™” to illustrate and play with this process, where a casual and popular word for young people becomes a lucrative commercial currency for brands.

Concept image: CHXXII cyber-wear ad illustrating Cyber-Yoot™ in commercial media, from the City Limits animation series idea.

CHXXII is the imagined cyber-wear label at the center of Neon Billboard, a brand where upgrades replace outfits and identity is a subscription model paid for through the exchange of personal data.

Styled in the visual language of a global streetwear and fashion house, CHXXII plays on consumer want, desire, belonging, and tech utility. And through its branding, user interface, and catalogue of aspirational lifestyle imagery, it delivers a believable off-the-shelf vision for us to buy into.

Concept image: CHXXII cyber-wear store and central London HQ, from the City Limits animation series idea.

Each CHXXII cyber-wear collection is more than a look, it’s an emotional upgrade. A product promise designed to deliver a desired state of being. Much like Alice’s Eat Me/Drink Me potions, these pieces transform the wearer and, in most cases, promise more than they actually can deliver.

Image: The CHXXII cyber-wear collection colours, promises and product names