TrustoCorp Hits Detroit And Rings A Bell

I've known about TrustoCorp and the people behind the vision for a while now, but have yet to post about it. I try to keep this site about work happening over advertising so that it doesn't become another street art blog and retains an interest in dissecting the differences between public space use by citizens versus corporate interests, critically looking at street art as opposed to aestheticizing it. I also thought that the NYC TrustoCorp projects content was a bit aggressive, but then again we sponsor and promote full on private property takeovers so who am I to talk about aggressive use of public space.

That said I have become increasingly interested in artist and activist projects that treat the city as canvas, playground, and or political soapbox, in an organized way. Projects like Paper Girl, V-tarp, and the like, have a way of demanding a public media presence without going through typical channels of consent. They also present an alternative to the individual artist based public space consumption seen with graffiti and street art, and they challenge notions of what types of agencies we might allow access to the curation of our shared environments. As advertising demands full control over our outdoor media environment, partially through the criminalization of unauthorized artistic practices, and partially through the public/private relationships that Kurt Iverson talks about in his paper Branded Cities, these projects are an important part of resisting the enclosure of public space.

And so, check out the TrustoCorp Flikr page. The most recent version in Detroit is uplifting and melts so seamlessly into the city infrastructure you almost wouldn't know it is there, or that it wasn't done through official channels. Blurring the line between authorized and unauthorized projects seems one way of erasing that line completely in the future.