This blog is a resource for ad takeover artists and information about contemporary advertising issues in public space. If you have content you would like to share, please send us an email.
As a collective group of Australian artists, we have been driven to reclaim public advertising space with posters speaking to the Australian government’s inaction on climate change and the devastating bushfires.
We do not accept that this situation is ‘business as usual’.
We are making these issues visible in our public spaces and in our media; areas monopolized by entities maintaining conservative climate denial agendas. If the newspapers won’t print the story, we will! #Bushfirebrandalism [More HERE]
Wunder, an independent Canadian creative agency based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has taken out $10,000 worth of advertising space only to fill it with absolutely nothing. In a stunt that ultimately goes against what the agency exists to do, the self-initiated campaign – titled White Christmas – offers respite from the deluge of advertising at this time of year by posting blank ads on print and digital billboards, buses, bus stops, newspapers, social media and even radio.More [HERE]
“Advice to the Museum of Modern Art about BIG donors with BIG ties to Jeffery Epstein,” reads a poster that appeared on a phone booth across the street from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan this past weekend. It continued: “MoMA should Kick Leon Black & Glenn Dubin off its Board immediately, drape the Black and Dubin Galleries in black, & put up wall labels explaining why.” The ad is signed by the veteran activist group Guerrilla Girls, who added their signature gorilla mask logo at the bottom of the poster. “The Guerrilla Girls volunteer to help write those labels,” the group adds. More [HERE]
"Who Is Gonna Pay For This Mess" in the Maine Arts Journal Quarterly
Huge thanks to the Maine Arts Journal for including my essay from the PublicAccess Zine in its entirety. As much as the PublicAccess Zine was about the artwork and media created by other people using the tools that I produce, that essay is an important part of explaining my thinking about cities, the energy they create and the desire we share to harness that energy for our collective good.
There is a collective us, in particular when we speak of cities. Parisians and Paolistas. These are the names we use when our cities reach scale and we stop referring to ourselves as from somewhere and instead as part of something. I’m a New Yorker. All of a sudden the bustle on our streets hits a fever pitch and our collective attention pervades the air so heavily that contracts are drawn up to determine who will be responsible for the accumulation of all those eyeballs and what percentages will be offered in return. Out of thin air and a saccadic frenzy, value is created in the cohabitation of a shared plot of land.
Curly, Philadelphia, PA
Walk around any major metropolis and you will recognize the network of signs, often connected to public infrastructure, set up to mine this resource. Pay attention. 10,000 impressions a day. 10,000 attentions paid. Put a sign there. And so it goes, expanding outward from the centers of density until the attention dissipates and it simply isn’t cost effective to build a structure to focus our thoughts. Calculations must be made. Entrepreneurial businessmen must loose sleep chasing their imaginations.
Pedro Sega, Madrid, Spain
And yet this resource isn’t like the others. This resource is human. When you sift through the soil, I lose nothing, but when you dig into my mind, I lose my train of thought. See what you pay attention to is what you are thinking about, and what you are thinking about makes you who you are. The two inextricably linked. The development of your thoughts, a direct linear result of the things you have attended to along the way. Which is one way of saying that what we put in front of our faces should be worth the price.
Joe Boruchow, Prosperity Theology, Philadelphia
I guess we could simply decide that despite our numbers we don’t want to mine the hills of our attention, leaving us instead with extended vistas of avenues and alleyways. The absence of signification, a welcome respite from the daily intoxication of our mediated world. It’s a worthwhile consideration, like leaving some trees in the forest, or some oil in the ground. But ask a Muscovite or Angelista, whose attention has created so much potential, to leave untapped the bounty of their creation and you will understand why our cities look the way they do. A constant roar blankets our streets and our bodies vibrate in proximity to one another. Who could stop us from erecting signs?
Matt Starr, New York, New York, photo by Pete Voelker
Dr D, London
And so they appear one after another along the horizon, heavy machinery erected downtown to tap the ferment of our minds. Each bus shelter, every taxi topper, billboard, flyposter, lollipop, phonebooth, and info kiosk is an industrial excavator mining your thoughts, momentarily distracting the trajectory of our thinking and converting that moment into a valuable resource. In truth, I find the whole thing a bit miraculous, like a well that doesn’t produce unless we all stand around watching it. Look away and the flow stops, turn back around and a steady stream of value comes pouring out. This is the great alchemy of our cities and the foundation upon which to make our demands.
Robert Montgomery, Stavanger, Norway, photo by Mark Rigney
Today the lion’s share of the attentional resources collected in our cities are siphoned off and sold to advertisers. Promotion swoons for opportunity and an exorbitant amount of money is exchanged to orchestrate what we are thinking about, if only for a brief moment in time. Repeated over the geography and infrastructure of our cities, those brief moments cohere into a meaningful focus, the echoes of which reverberate in our heads. One could take issue with this fact, the echoing, and I do. It bothers me to think about all the neurons we have encoded with the rambling logic of commercial myopia. The sustained focus we offer up to the machinations of consumer culture. Remember that the price for the intrusion is not only our distraction, but the needing it leaves behind.
Dede, Tel Aviv, Israel
And yet the weight of these impositions pales in comparison to the forfeiture of our collective resources and the missed opportunity to let the combustion on our streets reflect the inner dialogue of our minds. As it stands now those advertisers, intent to arrest your eyes and momentarily lay the groundwork for your thinking, empty their coffers into privatized hands. Multinational landlords of our shared public spaces collect the bounty of our attention and haul it off to shareholders and investment bankers. Modest revenue sharing schemes and public infrastructure contracts obscuring the obvious fact that the electricity between us has quietly come to serve someone else.
ARRT!, Brunswick, Maine, Brooklyn Ad Box
As a New Yorker I am always surprised how the clarity of this grievance escapes us. Our willingness to squander the abundance produced by our cohabitation, given the limited resources with which we make due. But what if the harvesting of our collective attention paid for something more than a blanket of consumerist propaganda? What if the alchemy of living in such close proximity to one another, for crowded trains and bustling streets, for gathering together on an island, or building a life together at the rivers bend, was that the network of signs on our streets championed the public’s interests? Each bus shelter, every taxi topper, billboard, flyposter, lollipop, phonebooth, and info kiosk, an opportunity to think for ourselves.
Icy and Sot, Istanbul, Turkey
This book documents a small selection of posters made using PublicAccess keys. It is a crude attempt to daydream into reality a more utopic future and promote a fleeting revolution from which the incantations on our streets burst with locality. Those who participated represent a small portion of the public with the time and privilege to dedicate to such activities. It does not escape me that a democracy of our voices would look a lot different than the pages of this book. But these efforts guide my belief that there are new models on the horizon for the redistribution of what we create by being together, tightly packed and with so much to say. Models that tap the wealth of our collective project and offer it back up to us as raw material with which to shape new cities. Each sign, an opportunity to distract us from ourselves, in the search for one another.
Follow the link below to see artists do ad takeover work by simply screen printing on the ads directly on the street. Now thats just plain fun. More [HERE]
A few years ago I went to Bien Urbain to do some workshops and install some artwork of my own. This festival is known for their support of alternative concepts in public art and civic engagement despite the fact that it takes place in a relatively small town in France where one would expect a more provincial attitude towards art and culture. The team did not disappoint and they continue to push and defend interesting projects as they look forward to thier 10th year running. When I left Besancon I made sure to leave a set of keys behind for anyone who might want to use the advertising infrastructure for thier own messaging. Over the years a few people have done so, including Quentin Coussirat whose experience as a graphic designer and artist made incredibly thoughtful and subtle interventions. More recently Anaïs Florin took the access to public space much more literally, launching a campaign and art project to defend the Les Vaîtes worker gardens that risk extinction due to real estate development. It seems wherever you are, some things change and some things always stay the same. Read more about Anais' project below.
Now that we completed the documentation of Anaïs Florin great project from last Bien Urbain festival, it's time to share it with you.
Anaïs is from Valencia and was invited by Hyuro to be part of the festival. She spent four days here in Besançon, three months following the issues of this local territorial fight and then one month going everyday to feel, talk, and share with gardeners about their relation to the place.
Les Vaîtes is a green place where workers used to have more or less official gardens since decades. It's a forest inside the city where it was impossible to build houses until the local government decided to sell the place to private promoters in order to build an "eco"district. Since more that 10 years, the neighbors were fighting the housing project for several reasons (to keep calm, because the feared the idea of new people coming...) and a new generation of eco-activists motivated by gardening and climate change issues helped to stop the demolition works when it started. Anaïs came in that moment where the city council and promoters were upset, the eco-activist asking themselves if the place should/could became a kind of "ZAD" and the old/immigrants gardeners were a bit lost concerning this new paradigm of civil disobedience.
After spending each day on site, taking pictures and speaking with everyone, she decided to highlight this struggle by a tribute to the place: printing 25 pictures of the gardens, painting on the sentence "Les Vaîtes before the eco-discrict" and put them illegally in city center busstops and lolipops.
She also glued on 2 billboards on the border of the gardens, with sentences from the gardeners "Touching the earth is always a highlight, it's soothing. Here we work with the living. Gardening is tenderness, it feeds the eyes, it feeds the heart."
No need to say that the mayor was upset again, and that it empowers a lot of people to think/discuss/discover this local subject in a very different way than press or activism propaganda.
We released the zine for the climate strike and will soon screen the video at the gardens, sharing ways of dealing with fights/art with a theater group working on the same place/story.
It's Anaïs project but obviously a great and lovely team helped her on. Thanks to all.
The MTA's hectoring poster campaign aimed at combatting fare evasion is getting a radical makeover, thanks to an anonymous group of New Yorkers with a simple message for their fellow riders: "Don't snitch. Swipe." More [HERE]
Anaïs Florin – “Les Vaîtes avant l’écoquartier” #1
A few years ago I participated in Bien Urbain in Besancon France. After installing a bunch of pieces around town, I then held a workshop. Participants of the workshop made thier own posters and then as a group, we went out and put them up together without permission from the city. The basic idea was that you had to put up your own poster so that you broke that barrier between you and your shared public environment. With the entire group watching, there was a sense of safety in numbers that made it much easier for people break the rules, not to mention you didn't want to be the one person in the group that decided to chicken out in front of your peers. It was a really fantastic experience and everyone came away with a grin from ear to ear and plans to do more actions in the future. I left a set of PublicAccess keys for the Bien Urbain team and since then there have been several projects that have taken advantage of them. Quentin Cousirrat recently made me aware of a project by artist Anais Florin who made the advertising space around Besancon integral to her participation in Bien Urbain this year. Unauthorized civic media production seems to be a small but vibrant part of the Besancon public life.
Leaving keys in cities and then years later seeing them still in use makes me incredibly happy. While I do enjoy making the keys, it can sometimes seem like a chore. When I run out of keys I spend several days restocking them by hand cutting, milling and welding all of the parts until I have enough to last another year, or sometimes just a few months. People purchase the keys for between 25 and 30 dollars, which seems like a lot, but after materials comes out to between 10 and 15 dollars for what can be several hours of work depending on which key. I don't really exhibit these functional sculptures, they just go out in the mail and I never see them again. What I do see are projects like this, which make all the time behind the drill press, boring out the centers of 6mm Hex bar, well worth the effort.
Anaïs Florin focuses her attention on places, on their history, their transformation and the struggles associated with them. Her practice mixes art and activism in a listening dynamic and a benevolent collaboration with the people of the territory.
For the 9th edition of Bien Urbain, she intervened in the Vaîtes district by meeting the gardeners who defend this place. Her first work, “Les Vaîtes avant l’écoquartier” (“The Vaîtes before the ecodistrict”) was a collection of 25 photographs put in billboards and bus shelters in the city center and the tram line linking it to the Vaîtes district.
More [HERE]
Below is a wonderful essay by RJ Rushmore for Monument Lab. Im not sure how much RJ is aware of the writing of Jeff Ferrell but his sentiments echo a lot of Jeff's criminological research. Pigeon holed by the anti advertising title, most anti advertising activists are actually trying to imagine what might replace the commercial images that surround us if given the chance. RJ is well aware of this and like a lot of us, trying to figure out how to recontextualize what he is doing so that it broadens his demands and has more potential to change not only our streets, but fundamental ways in which we interact and exist with one another. Fantastic.
Skateboarders refuse to see the city as intended. It is a playground. It is theirs. Every curb, bench, and set of stairs is a potential skateable object. Even though I put down my own skateboard around age 15, that mindset stayed with me. Skateboarding gave me a gift: the inclination to resist the pressures that cities feed us to be passive. As I've spent the last decade alongside artists who intervene in public spaces (be that through street art, graffiti, public art, or street performance), that inclination has matured, evolved, and became the driving force behind my work as a writer and curator. More [HERE]
The War on Messaging: Advertising and the Fight for Your Attention
Very Excited to be on a panel with my colleagues and good friends RJ Rushmore and Katherine Lorimer, Moderated by Josh McPhee on May 2nd at 7pm. We will talk briefly about our individual projects and relationship to the ad takeover world and then open it up to Josh and the audience to delve deeper into the efficacy and motivations of ad takeover work. Please come out and support our work and the Moniker fair which has been kind enough to host us.
Friends made me aware of the fact that an Identitarian group in Berlin had hijacked some ad space for thier refugees go home messages. It obviously upset a lot of people and an interesting Reddit conversation started [HERE]
While I in no way agree with the hate filled rhetoric and behavior surrounding protectionist solutions to economic and social unrest, not to mention the outright racism at the heart of most of these beliefs, I do see a place for the messages in public space (if only briefly). For me the public environment is an opportunity for expression and that does not come with censorship of certain ideas and individuals. It is a democratic space in which all can be heard and all can react to the ideas each of us put forward. No one group should dominate the civic media environment.
That said, I would expect these messages to be removed immediately by citizens who saw thier hate speech for what it is. I think that by negotiating our shared public spaces together we learn about eachother, react to one another, and then learn again. In the end, what gets left on our walls is who we truly are and so the negotiation is as important as the content.
Our good friends at Dog Section Press just released a short documentary on the radical subvertising that has been happening in London for the past few years. It is a fantastic look at some of the politics and actions of a unique group of activists trying to change the conversation on how we co-curate our shared public spaces. Give it a watch and let us know what you think.
Our friends in Norway are launching a Subvertising campaign to coincide with their national Holiday. There is an open call for submissions and I highly suggest you try to support them if you can. If you are paying attention to the work of advertising, you will notice the growing list of groups and projects aimed at tackling the commercial abuse of our shared public spaces and the lack of civic dialogue afforded to those spaces because of the monopoly commercial media has on them. It is wonderful to see one more group added to the list and I look forward to seeing their project in action.
Vi kan bedre (We can do better)
250 artworks - 5 cities - 1 day
Summary
Vi kan bedre (We can do better) is a nationwide day of action that will see 250 adverts replaced with art in five major cities across Norway on May 17th.
What?
A utopian art project that aims to stimulate conversation about what ´we can do better´ to uphold the values celebrated on Norway´s National Day.
The coordinated day of action follows the time-honored traditions of ´subvertising ´ (subverting advertising), ad-hacking, culture jamming and more as a means of reclaiming the city as a co-created space.
We believe the time has come to celebrate the values we share as Norwegians while revealing the self-interested forces undermining them and are calling upon all proud Norwegian's to practice what they preach by supporting this campaign.
Why?
We believe that the visual realm in public space belongs to everyone, not just the businesses and organisations that can afford to rent our attention. We believe that public space should be a forum for dialogue, debate and the exchange of ideas, not least on May 17th.
Inequality, pollution, climate change, mass extinction; all these problems are caused by the processes of consumer capitalism, which is fuelled by advertising.
Whether it's the recently approved copper mine in Kvalsund in the Arctic Circle; the dumping of mine waste in Repparfjord on the coast of the Barents Sea; or the overall increase in oil and gas production - set to hit a new peak level in 2023 - the changes we are witnessing to both the natural environment and civil society concern us all.
When?
Advertisers calculate the value of a campaign based on the number of people (or eyeballs) that see it. As such, there´s no more valuable day for outdoor advertising than 17th May, when whole cities and communities take to the streets for a day of parades and celebrations to mark Norway's independence.
How?
Artists, activists, designers, illustrators, photographers, writers, poets from all backgrounds are invited to submit their artwork through an online submission process administrated via our dedicated website: www.vikanbedre.com
Our crowdfunding campaign aims to raise 35,249kr to cover the cost of professionally printing and distributing 250 large-format prints to 5 Norwegian cities where they will be installed by our teams prior to May 17th.
Pictures of the installed artworks will be uploaded to social media using the hashtag #vikanbedre as well as circulated to all of our backers via email.
Each artwork will also be made available for download, for free, after the action on May 17th via our dedicated website: www.vikanbedre.com
Who?
Vi kan bedre (We can do better)is a not-for-profit platform created by a dedicated group of volunteers made up of artists, activists and environmentalists who love the country of Norway and what it represents.
Activists of the far-right "Identitarian Movement" have plundered billboards of Wall AG in Berlin. They exchanged existing advertising with their own posters at several locations. This warns the movement observed by the constitutional protection, among other things, from a suspected infiltration. The action was carried out according to the Identity movement in other German cities. More [HERE]
Factcheck: ‘Eén reclamebord verbruikt evenveel energie als drie huishoudens'
While it is poor form to have your facts easily misinterpreted or refuted, the fact that this article concentrates solely on debunking the specific amount of energy an advertisement uses and not on the underlying premise of the argument seems short sighted. We need to make smart choices about the way we use our collective resources be they energy or our attention. The fact that we use any resources on the promotion of commercial media in our shared public spaces should be the question at hand, not how much.
VIA: Bruzz
De posters van Act For Climate Justice moeten de aandacht trekken en dat is alvast gelukt. Niet alleen in Brussel, maar ook in Leuven, Gent, Oostende, Antwerpen, Namen en Luik werden ze in de nacht van 29 op 30 januari opgehangen op elektronische reclameborden. Naast de claim over het hoge energieverbruik wordt opgeroepen massaal de betrokken ministers rechtstreeks aan te spreken. Dat kan via de website wakeupyourministers.be. More [HERE]
On a warm evening last November, Melbourne street artist CDH broke into a Moorabbin bus shelter and started furiously spraying an image on to a Streets ice-cream advertisement.
Soon after he stole away into the night with the defaced billboard, after convincing a pair of police officers who challenged him that he had “permission”.
It’s been just over a year since the launch of Art in Ad Places, a guerrilla project to replace a small fraction of the flotsam of display advertising filling the New York cityscape with art. Now that the 52-week public service campaign has run its course, an exhibition of photographs of the public art project shot by street art photographer Luna Park, and an accompanying book, will ensure that the ephemeral project endures. More [HERE]
One of my ongoing personal projects these past few years has been the Collisions series. These photos document simple graphic BW patterns illegally installed into outdoor advertising around the world. On the street, the patterns are intended to grab a viewers attention with an image that has little reference to advertising and is hard to interpret as anything other than an interruption. I am interested in viewers thinking about the act of disobedience, the space around the advertisement, the frame that holds it. I want to create a small amount of room for radical imaginaries to blossom and allow utopian visions to tumble out of simple disruptions of reality.
"In elaborating and image of the future, utopian thought also generates a viewpoint from which the present becomes open to critique."
I choose the Collisions locations very carefully to create strong, well balanced photographs of the city. I want viewers of the photographs to be able to come back to the imagery over and over again. I want them to be meditative and an opportunity for believers to renew thier belief.
For those that only see the documentation, the images can be anemic. Proof of the politics that took place on the street isnt immediately recognizable. But hidden within the image itself is a digital video of the street installation viewable through an augmented reality mobile app. In this way the photographs take thier creative politics with them wherever they go, and for me remain charged objects.
Last year I decided to take the first 15 images from the Collisions series and put them in a small Zine/Booklet. It is a beautiful little signed edition of 400. Three essays by Jeff Ferrell, Thomas Dekeyser, and Carlo McCormick give the imagery unique context and insight. Thier thoughts give credence to the idea that our role as individuals is to push on the margins and expand our collective understanding of the world around us.
Special Patrol Group started the year off with some illicit anarchist poetry. In 2018 let us all remember that we are many, and they are few. More often than not your troubles are my troubles and mine yours. Solidarity with your fellow man and woman is the only way to build a collective will that could demand equality for all.
Anarchists greet commuters in London with subversive anti-capitalist poetry on the first day back to work for many.
"Anarchist poetry" was illicitly installed into advertising spaces on the London Underground this morning. The designs mimicked Transport for London's official Poetry on the Underground campaign, in what is thought to be an act of "Subvertising". The poems both have an anti-capitalist theme, and their installation was timed to coincide with what is the first day back to work for many Londoners.
The ad-hack has been claimed by Special Patrol Group, who said:
"We wanted to invite our fellow workers to think about the nature of work under capitalism - especially after we've all just had a few days off. If you don't like it, perhaps 2018 can be the year we act together to replace useless toil with useful work and be done with Bullshit Jobs forever. A three-day week sounds nice, doesn't it?"
The Masque of Anarchy, written in 1832 by English Romantic poet Percy Shelley, has been updated to give it a feminist twist. After a year that saw scandals around the gender pay gap and sexual harassment, Special Patrol Group say they changed the poem to read "Women of England" (where it had previously been addressed to the men of England) to highlight the fact that "women are particularly oppressed by the workplace".
They further explained:
"From shitty pay to sexual harassment, women have the worst of it in the workplace. We hope that will change in 2018."
The self-described "shadowy subvertising organisation" claimed that hundreds of the posters have been installed on the Underground by a network of autonomous volunteers. The group carried out a similar intervention on the first day back to work in January 2015:
