NOAD Day 2016 - November 27th

NO-AD DAY is in 15 days, are you ready? 

In 2014, 63 participants took to the streets and more than 300 advertisements were removed, and we want to keep that momentum goring. We hope that you will join us in this third year again!

The task is easy, go out on November 27th and remove as many advertisements as you can.

Don't forget to take a photograph of the empty bus shelter, phone booth, billboard, or whatever type of advertisement you have chosen to liberate. Share this image with the rest of us by posting it to Facebook, sending it directly to the NOAD email, or sharing it on social media with the hashtag #NOADday.

WHAT IS NOAD Day? 
NOAD Day is an ongoing civil disobedience project begun in 2014 as an expression of global resistance to the use of our shared public spaces for advertising and commercial media. The goal of the project is to create a global voice of dissatisfaction against the use of our public spaces for a commercial media that is a detriment to our collective psyche. The more participation we have, the greater our voice, so take a minute this November 27th to join the party.

WHEN:
November 27th (anytime)

WHO? 
Anyone who thinks actively in what’s a democratic public space, whether adbusters, activists, artists, graffiti writers, street artists, sociologists, philosophers...

WHY?
To reduce the impact of advertising. To question the lack of decision of the citizens in terms of the configuration of the public space —which belongs to us— and to reduce the mental/visual pollution that we are daily exposed to. On November 28/29 the “Buy Nothing Day” is celebrated by the people all around the world. The “BND” was a Project promoted by Adbusters magazine, where the participants avoid buying during 24 hours. The idea of making our Project one day before “BND” is a poetical way to reduce the impact of advertising on the buying decision of the citizens.

HOW?
For those who don’t have a key, we made a tutorial on how to make your own key.
You can watch it here.
If this one is not working in your city or you prefer to buy other keys you can do it here.

Comunication:
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/noadday/ 
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/noad.day/ 
EMAIL: noaddayproject@gmail.com
HASHTAG: #NOADday To send a secure email please use my Public Key and send it to vermibus.art@googlemail.com

Adbusters Includes TrustoCorp's Masat Addition

Recently, Trustocorp's addition to the MaSAT project was printed in Adbusters Magazine. While I was a bit disappointed they included the project under the meme's page, essentially reducing the entire event to the "slogan" Trustocorp submitted, I was happy to see the article on the following page. A Unified Thoery of Mental Pollution by Micah White, opens with this paragraph…

"How do we fight back against the incessant flow of logos, brands, slogans and jingles that submerge our streets, invade our homes and flicker on our screens? We could wage a counteroffensive at the level of content: attacking individual advertisements when they cross the decency line and become deceptive, violent or overly sexual. But this approach is like using napkins to clean up an oil spill. It fails to confront the true danger of advertising - which is not in its individual messages but in the damage done to our mental ecology by the sheer volume of its flood."

While the article goes on to champion the writing of Michel Serres and the mental environmentalist movement, essentially it proposes a merger between our concept of mental and physical toxins in our shared environments. In this way we should be as concerned about Carcinogens and cellphone radiation as we should the proliferation of media into the smallest recesses of our lives. Wow. While this ecological approach seems more fitting for our pastoral notions of the good life, I am an urban dweller through and through. In the city, it is not the vistas that need to be protected but our psyche. The difference I want to note is that while in a suburban environment we might want to keep the landscape "clean" and intrusion free, in an urban environment I believe we must find a way to omit advertising and replace it with a more public, but no less intense form of media. The benefits I find to being surrounded by people and the manifestation of their personal thoughts on the walls of our city is profound and I in no way wish for the removal of this type of communication.

This notions seems to agree with Michel Serres interpretation of a mental environmentalist movement but without having fully read his work I cannot say at this point if I am correct.

VIA Adbusters

"Michel Serres, an eccentric French philosopher, has written the first truly philosophical work of the mental environmentalist movement, a radical re-conception of pollution that hones the Adbusters critique. The big idea of his book, Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim, and appropriate territory through defiling it and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from primitive pollution, urine and feces, to "hard pollution", industrial chemicals, and "soft pollution", the many forms of advertising. [More Here]