Let Me Handle This-2nd Wave

It's my birthday today so I think it appropriate to muse on the next year a bit before I go into the Let Me Handle This Project outcome. Last year was fantastic. TOSAT went swimmingly and proved out of country large scale ad takeovers are possible. Working with PosterChild, Sean Martindale, the Duspa collective and of course Jasper Reese, was wonderful. I'm looking forward to pulling off another one this year on and even larger scale and working with a new city and new collaborators. It is my hope that we can grow the project even further and include hundreds of artists the next time around. Only time will tell but keep your ears to the ground. The Taking from the Tip Jar exhibition was a great way to jump back into the gallery setting after a few years of hard core organizing efforts. I can't thank Vincent Michael enough and I look forward to more gallery productions this year. In fact I'm starting a new piece today. Upcoming, PublicAdCampaign is looking to engage public space in new and innovative ways, keep your eyes open for augmented reality public art collaborations and the PublicAdCampaign project taking on public media curation along side critical commentary on advertising's use of public space. Lastly for those of you who know me well, we finally wrapped a 2 year long secret project which I am still not fully at liberty to talk about. Look for some serious documentation, exhibitions, and other media to come out within the next year. It's gonna be a good one friends...

Let Me Handle This Wrap Up:

On december 3rd, the Taking From The Tip Jar exhibition came down and with it the experiment I called Let Me Handle This ended as well. While in Philidelphia for the opening of my show I installed 3 quick ad takeovers to start the Let Me Handle This project. While the project only lasted for the month the show was on, I was hoping it would have grown slightly larger over its duration. Nonetheless it was an interesting experiment and one I might explore further in the months to come.

Essentially the idea was to try and force the media companies in Philadelphia to leave up my work for a month. I started by putting up 3 ad takeovers that can be seen here. In an effort to insure they remained in place I posed a small threat. If removed, I would retaliate by doubling the amount of work I had put in Philly, in New York. This notion that removing my work would only increase the number of ads taken over by a factor of two, I was hoping would deter the companies from taking action against my small media grab. While Philadelphia would not incur immediate harm by removing my 3 takeovers, if NY then chose to remove the 6 I had put up, Philly would then receive 12 ad takeovers. In this way the companies each would be forced to take responsibility for the increase in my aggressiveness and be able to weigh the potential gain of leaving up such a small number of detournments. I felt because it was only for a small period of time this would not have been such a big deal.

Turns out it took almost 3 weeks for the work to be removed in Philly. This was most likely because they have slow turnaround in Philly, although many OOH companies watch my site and when I post pictures, I often find my work removed within hours. Once the work was removed in Philly I did retaliate with 6 more takeovers in NY (below). These stayed up for enough time to get me through the end of the show which meant that the project was over. I was hoping removal would happen faster on both fronts and that I might at least have reached a single action of 24 posters. Alas, this did not happen and if I do something similar again I will need to increase the duration of the project to insure many removals and thus an increase in the total scope of my takeovers. Again, unless the companies just wanna leave my work up for a few months.