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.
Eduardo Moises Penalver & Sonia Kaytal Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership
Barbara Ehrenreich Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Lewis Hyde The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Geoffrey Miller Spent: Sex, Evolution, & Consumer Behavior
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
"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.
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]
I just got back from London where Tina Ziegler held the first TAC (The Art Conference) in a beautiful old factory venue called the Ugly Duck. I was asked to open two days of pretty intense talks about Art, Technology, and social engagement. I took the task seriously and used my work to show how advertising, as one of the sub genre's of cultural production systems, undermines social progress by monopolizing the systems of dissemination, prohibiting access and participation, economically driving technological determinism, and framing our cultural values in frighteningly self serving ways. It all went pretty well despite not having a podium to put my papers on. Given the chance to do it again I plan to do a little more memorization, and to attempt to go beyond advertising to Art itself, which has its own way of slowing social progress in ways which are similar to advertising itself.
Notable speakers from the conference were RJ Rushmore who's talk From Dissidence to Decorative derided projects like Urban Nation as decorative city wallpaper intent on raising property value more than providing any of the real radical politics once prescribed to street art. As a nice opposition to that, Teresa Latuszewska spoke about the Urban Forms mural project in Lodz Poland which is a sanctioned mural project but one that works hard to reach out to the community and integrate itself deep into the skin of the city. They have also done some pretty boring and thankless work gathering hard statistics on peoples feelings towards the individual murals and the culture in general. Mia Grundahl spoke about Women on Walls which I knew little about and which practically brought me to tears. To say that these projects proved RJ's point would be an understatement.
Similarly heartbreaking and inspirational was the work of Robert Montgomery whose texts can often be found on the street where advertising once broadcast its messages loudly. Robert has taken over billboards illegally, but he has also worked directly with the OOH companies to place his work. At first I was upset that he would collaborate with the enemy, but after speaking with him and hearing him talk, I realized that my radical politics was less important to him than ensuring there was an alternative voice to the aggressive commercial megaphone we are often confronted with on a daily basis. His writing, a sort of haunting conversation with the city and capitalism, draws a beautiful contrast that works to undermine consumerist propaganda. While I surely like his illegal pieces better, I cannot say that the sanctioned pieces are less effective to someone who doesn't know the politics behind anti ad activity. And finally Dan Witz took me on a nostalgic trip back to his earliest work that began in 1978 a year before I was born. That guy has been doing groundbreaking street art before the term was coined, hell even before graf made its mark. A true pioneer.
All in all it was a fantastic event and I look forward to the next. If you have an opportunity to visit one yourself, I highly suggest taking the time.
A quick installation on Commercial street, London
The incredible force behind TAC01 Tina Ziegler
The crowd at the first TAC
Talking to Dan Witz about staying the course and privilege
Robert Montgomery
Speaking about how advertising undermines social progress
Speaking about how advertising undermines social progress
While I definitely think there are some additions to this Anti-Advertising history, I was super happy to be included in the timeline. The fact of the mater is that despite the growth of advertising alongside the rise of global capitalism, there is a strong resistance being mounted from artists and academics alike that see it as an important battleground for addressing the rampant pillaging of our planet and the de-evolution of our critical public discourse.
Well-known Philly artist Joe Boruchow has recently added three new works to his portfolio — and to the streets of Philly. Each are rendered in Boruchow’s signature black-and-white paper cutouts, cut from a single sheet of black paper and wheat pasted to platforms around the city. The latest designs mock Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and protest the statue erected in honor of 1970’s Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo in front of the Municipal Services Building.
Read more [HERE]
Joe Boruchow is one of a few Philadelphia based artist that have been doing some amazing work in the Philly bus shelter system. This new piece blew me away not only for its beauty but also for its politics and placement. Indicting Frank Rizzo for his unsavory past, Joe uses the bus shelter infrastructure to place his political criticism within the vicinity of a statue of Mr. Rizzo giving it a different value than graffiti or some other form of visual protest. This is top notch use of the PublicAccess keys and I can't wait to see more out of Joe, and the rest of you for that matter people!
Let’s demote this “crumb bum” and remove his statue from the steps of Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building. Frank Rizzo’s legacy of racial divisiveness and thuggery is no longer one that Philly should endorse. Like an effigy of an authoritarian dictator, the statue looms over our provincial politics and is a symbol of our dysfunction. Move him somewhere less prominent and let’s reserve our high profile public spaces for memorials of figures that all Philadelphians can be proud of.
Everyone Hates Public Ads. Meet the Man Who Is Trying to Take Them All Down.
Here is a nice little video about the PublicAccess project produced by Aymann Ismail for slate.com. It's short and succinct, and while there are so many aspects and arguments behind what and why I do what I do, I think it makes a clear statement.
It’s a little past 3 p.m. in Manhattan, and Jordan Seiler is getting ready for his next public-ad intervention. He uses a homemade key he forged earlier from scratch to access an ad display in a bus shelter. After rolling up the ad and tossing it, he installed a simple black-and-white pattern he designed in its place. More [HERE]
Icy and Sot were just out in LA and had a chance to put thier PublicAccess keys to good use. I love the fact that these two make it a point to do a few ad takeovers in whatever city they end up in, regardless of why they are in town. This is the kind of autonomous action I was hoping to make possible with the PublicAccess project and I hope to see more activity like it in the future.
I sent this email out to Public Access key holders yesterday as NOAD Day is shortly upon us. Not all PublicAdCampaign readers have Public Access keys but its worth a mention on this site in case those same readers have resources of thier own and want to contribute to this global initiative.
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Friends and Public Access Key Holders,
It's that time of year again when we collectively take to the streets and remove advertising across the globe to express our collective discontent with the use of our public spaces for commercial messaging. Last year 62 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 second year, or join us again, if you participated in 2014.
The task is easy, go out on November 27th and remove at least one advertisement. 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 the Tumblr or Facebook, sending it directly to the NOAD Gmail, or sharing it on social media with the hashtag #NOADday. Feel free to share your experience, write about why you participated, or anything else you find relevant to the project.
**For those of you in the United States, NOAD Day is the day after Thanksgiving. Shake off that sense of gluttony with some good old fashioned civil disobedience, have fun with your relatives by engaging the city you love, or just take a damn shot of whatever is still lying around and get out there and join the fight. You can spend the rest of your lazy friday basking in the knowledge that you participated in a growing community of people who demand better cities for a better citizen.
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.
The PublicAccess project continues to expand and offer access to more outdoor advertising infrastructure around the world. Recently we added three new keys allowing access to Miami, Berlin, Hangzhou, Bodoe, Philadelphia, and Mexico city.
To get involved or find out more about the project, visit the site [HERE] and take a look below.
A big part of the PublicAccess project is made possible by people around the world wanting to open bus shelters in thier own city. They contact us and then we work to figure out if we can help. Sometimes that means recognizing an old locking system that we already have access to, and other times that means making something new by working with an enthusiastic partner. In the end the process is always a collaborative effort that we enjoy, and often results in new markets being opened up for truly public communications.
Recently we gained access to Philadelphia and with new tools comes new thoughts and ideas on our streets. This PSA by NDA is an amazing example of the kind of lighthearted and yet generous ideas I think would populate a truly open public visual landscape free of advertising. I say good riddance to the disaster preparedness PSA's that demand we take personal responsibility for our fate in the next typhoon by hoarding tuna cans and batteries, and I say welcome to a constant reminder of my own tendency to preemptively sabotage my own desires... as offered by an actual human being! But seriously. If the placement of messages in our public space is to actually communicate ideas with each other, I think it should be noted that I have a tendency to contemplate the ideas of an individual over the bureaucracy, the local over the distant.
What people do with thier PublicAccess key is up to them. Sometimes a participant uses the key to promote thier own street wear brand, but more often than not, participants offer genuine outreach to others. This simple text installation on the streets of NY caught my eye, trying to enjoy each day, but finding myself failing to reach my goals and expectations, which always leaves me wanting more. Imperfectly calibrated happiness machines indeed...
We try hard to keep the PublicAccess project going so that the everyone can have access to our outdoor advertising infrastructure, and the predominant space for public visual communication.
The PublicAccess Website Has Been Updated To Include New Cities and Photos
The PublicAccess Project site has updated with new cities, new keys, and new work done by artists and individuals from around the world. As PublicAdCampaign readers will know, we launched the PublicAccess project just a few months ago and have been steadily sending out keys ever since, as well as gathering information about distant lands and thier advertising infrastructure. Check the video shot during a much needed stock replenishment.
As an ongoing project, we are always looking to expand the PublicAccess map and get more people involved. If you don't see your city on the map, but want to help us figure it out, email us and we will be happy to troubleshoot the problem with you.
Until then, enjoy some of the fantastic work that is being produced with PublicAccess tools and get involved yourself by getting a key right now.
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — A San Francisco Muni bus stop “advertisement” in the Mission District depicts Chester Cheetah as Jesus, drawn hanging from a rough sketch of a cross with the words, “He Died For Our Snacks.” More [HERE]
Over the past year, I have been slowly working on a project that I call PublicAccess. While the project is ongoing and will continue to grow over the coming years, the website is finally finished and ready for users. PublicAccess is a participatory open source project and we hope you get involved.
Nearly every major metropolitan city has an active bus or trolley system. Over the years, this vital public service has become an integral part of the global outdoor advertising industry in the form of bus shelters and other municipal infrastructure. Chances are if a city has meaningful surface transit, a select few global outdoor advertising companies will operate public amenities like bus shelters, for which they have the sole right to display for profit commercial advertising.
This global corporate message stands against our public interest by distracting us from each other in favor of ourselves, invoking our desires to the detriment of our environment, and silencing our public voices by institutionalizing corporate visual expression in our shared public spaces. The PublicAccess project aims to reverse this one-way communication by providing access to municipal infrastructure for public dialogues. Artists and individuals can treat the tools offered through this site as functional sculptures to interject their thoughts into our shared public spaces.
PublicAccess is an ongoing project. We are looking for ways to expand this map, and the tools we can offer. If you do not see your city, or if you can help us fill in this map more accurately, please email us at info@publicadcampaign.com.
I've been working on an augmented reality project out in San Diego over the past few months. While traveling I always like to make sure I figure out how to break into bus shelters for the Public Access Project (sorry this link will remain broken for a few more weeks). This post is another installation of the Iselin image, proving access was established in SD, and that keys will be made available shortly through a dedicated website that I am looking forward to finally launching in the New Year.
Street artists deploy a variety of methods to get their work seen by the masses. One of these time-honored NYC traditions involves cracking open advertisement kiosks and swapping out the ads with custom art. It’s what put Kaws on the map in the late 1990s and a practice that has been used sporadically since, although lately, it’s happening with increasing frequency. And there’s a very specific reason why. More [HERE]
BR1 just sent me these images from Torino Italy. We had a a chance to catch up while he was in NY and I made sure he left with a few keys to use on his travels. Looks like they have begun to come in handy and I am excited to see more ad takeovers resulting from the Public Access key production.
UC Berkely Class Talk and San Francisco/Oakland Bus Shelter Access
Me and the UC Berkeley students in front of a takeover in Oakland, CA. 2014
At the end of April I was in Oakland visiting a group of students at UC Berkeley California. The students were wrapping up a seminar class on the philosophy of street art taught by an old high school friend of mine, Seth Yalcin. I haven't spoke to Seth since high school and he found my work when he was forced to watch This Space Available on a leg of his flight home. The documentary was a larger investigation of outdoor advertising's role in public space and the various actors that fall on every side of the debate. I guess his interest was peaked and shortly thereafter he got in touch about putting together a syllabus.
Students seemed to come from a few different disciplines, including urban planning and development, which I was happy to see. We spoke for about an hour in class and then went out to the streets for a quick little action. I absolutely love teaching and working with students of all ages. The energy and enthusiasm, in most students, is infectious.
Market Street, San Francisco 2014
While I was in Oakland I made sure to get out in San Francisco to test some of the infrastructure there and see what was accessible. There are a plethora of bus shelter and free standing advertising frames littered throughout the city operated by Clear Channel. It didn't take long before two trips to the hardware store had fashioned the elusive 5 sided tamper proof bit that is required to open most of these structures.
Hand crafted tool for San Francisco Clear Channel advertising
Mission Street public restroom 2014
While in San Francisco, I noticed that JCDecaux operates the public restrooms sporadically strewn around Bart Station entrances. I carry all of my keys with me on my travels so I quickly replaced this advertisement to show that I could. Slowly an archive of keys is building which will be put online in the coming months as the PublicAccess project.
