Urban Subversion and the Creative City

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of Oli Mould's Urban Subversion and the Creative City. His explanation of The Creative City Paradigm was thorough and accessible. I learned more about how the neoliberal policies of disinvestment laid the ground work for the global competition between cites that has been at the heart of Creative City strategies and other forms of urban regeneration which privilege developers and investment over the citizens of our great metropolises. He clearly explains how culture and ultimately creativity were used to attract tourism dollars, private investment, and other forms of support that kept many cities viable as states left them for dead with austerity measures that were simply untenable. As culture grew to represent a valuable commodity amongst competing cities, new forms of urban regeneration strategies were pitched around the Creative City concept most famously championed by Richard Florida. These strategies, disguised as calls for more creativity and creative approaches to city building, provided a framework for capitalist accumulation through the development of economically depressed neighborhoods whose "regeneration" could yield huge profits as investors bought low and sold high, often with huge incentives from competing cities who had neglected these neighborhoods in the first place. It is a pretty bleak view of city development that highly favors the capitalist over the citizen, always under pressure to carve out thier own existence in a system designed to extract as much value from them as possible with the expectation that your individual tenacity will replace the ever decreasing opportunity and safety net that we once held up as a bulwark against total domination by economic precariousness.

But then again we all know this. In a society that is erected on the concept of individual competition over mutual aide, getting fleeced by your neighbor is expected behavior and those that have the capital to amplify thier con job do well. In New York we have resorted to insane tax breaks to incentivize developers to create affordable housing. Makes perfect sense. If the objective of a developer is to make money, there is no incentive to build affordable housing that makes less money than luxury housing. That's individual competition at work. If the objective is to get as many people into homes as possible so they can have stability and all of the productive benefits that go with it, then that is mutual aid. They are kind of mutually exclusive and all the incentives in the world wont change the fact that we privilege profit over people as an underlying theme to our social order. Plain and simple.

As a prescription, the second half of Oli Mould's book asks us to consider a creative city with a lower case c. One that defies the market processes of neoliberal ideologies and remakes cities for people instead of profit. It all sounds fantastic except like most other theses on the topic, the prescriptions are tactics like Derive and flanuerism, yarn bombing, and parkour, which stand as legitimate contestation to a mode of thinking that is extracting huge surplus value from our cities and communities on a daily basis. These lines of flight, it is presumed can be followed long enough that they lead us to different cities in which the neoliberal agenda is usurped by new forms of social relations based on truly creative endeavors that exist outside of capitalist imperatives. Desire production, endeavors to produce novel ideas and concepts that happen without a monetary incentive. My own anti advertising efforts are no more effective than any of the examples Oli gives, and they seem mostly to "keep the water moving" so things don't ice over and become impenetrable. It is depressing that in the face of such overwhelming forces of wealth monopolization and social inequality, our remedies (mine included) are art projects and the fanciful dreams of psychogeographers. Im not smart enough yet to see better answers but with problems as big as Oli Mould is showing us, we need better options for resistance if we are going to win the fight for better cities that serve citizens over profit and see the generation of wealth created in our great metropolises as the product of everyone that lives there.

Now don't get me wrong, read this book. I am particularly ornery as of late because I too am faced with a monumental problem that doesn't seem to have an answer. Mainly, how is my work contributing to the greater good and if it is, does the minimal effect it has warrant my time and energy. The problems Oli points out are real, but also part of a much larger system of domination that prevents the distribution of value created by humanity to the entirety of the the human population but instead offers up arguments for why some innovators should horde the majority of that value for themselves. As I looked for cracks of resistance, I saw autonomous thought as a good battleground to wage a fight. Advertising and the persuasion machine it represents not only negatively influences our behavior and increases our desire for individual competition over mutual aide, but it also drowns out any other ideas that might occupy our minds which run counter individual interest over collective interest. If we could just get control of the reigns and create more democratic civic media environments where inequality could be laid bare instead of disguised, we might have a chance. And yet that terra firma is now turning to mush under my feat. What once looked like a a clear and present danger to be confronted headlong has been usurped the behavioral modification techniques of surveillance capitalism, opaque beyond our wildest dreams because its form is too vague to outline as of yet. Unless that is Shoshana Zuboff's new publication can begin to define the edges, and the new frontier on which we can resist.

A Brief Look At Why I Remove And Replace Outdoor Advertising

People often ask me why I do ad-takeovers and promote similar civil disobedience amongst my peers. The simple answer is that I believe ingesting too much commercial media (advertising) makes it harder for us to be mindful conscientious citizens, and anything we can do to make our personal and collective behavior better is a step in the right direction to achieving a more just and equitable world. This belief is supported by scientific research into advertising’s psychological impact on the individual, along with the resulting behavioral challenges it creates for us socially, but which is beyond the scope of this essay.

Buried right below the surface of that “why” question is another, and that is what task is accomplished by your ad-takeover work? What wrong is being righted by removing or replacing outdoor ads? And ultimately, will or could ad-takeover work ever result in real social change? I believe the answer is yes, which is why I continue use it as the main focus of my artistic project.

Advertising aggression and the desired city:

Advertising is the promotion and dissemination of messages whose primary interest is to convince you to align yourself with the advertisers agenda. Often this is the purchase of a product or service, which gives the entire affair a somewhat nefarious atmosphere as the practitioners work to persuade you to their ends.

For this reason most of us are skeptical of advertising and its goals, particularly those of us who see the economic and environmental issues that our society faces, in large part due to the rampant consumerism fueled by advertising itself. Many of us also deride advertising for the social and psychological impact it has on us by preying on our insecurities or appealing to our own self-interest. Even when advertising is at its best and masquerades its activities as a gentle nudge, we see its intention with the clarity offered by the inescapable truth that it is out to change our minds.

Because of this, we all seem to intuit that the form itself is to be avoided and when asked about a more conscientious media environment, that the individual advertising tactics are irrelevant. More often than not we seek to avoid the pressure placed on us by advertising.

And yet an increasing number of our cities are offering more and more space to these messages. Today, this situation seems inevitable because so many of us have grown up in cities surrounded by commercial media, and to question it seems like a fanciful dalliance towards a dead end. We sit by and watch as billboards and placards have given way to a vast infrastructure on which outdoor advertising resides including our buses(inside and outside)-bus stops-subways-subway stations-subway platforms-subway entrances-subway fare cards-taxi cabs(inside and outside)-pedicabs-trolleys-airports-freestanding placards-building facades-sidewalks-construction hoardings-wall wraps-pop up marketing events, etc. etc. Even the skies are written on in the summer months in New York.

The deep saturation of our public environments with commercial media is written into the language and strategies employed by the industry itself, offering “station domination” campaigns to compete in already heavily media saturated environments. The fact of the matter is that navigating public space in our cities involves interacting with large amounts of commercial advertising.

As a lifelong city resident, this obvious schism between individual desire and how cities are currently practiced is difficult to swallow. It seems to defy the idealistic utopian logic of cities that I fondly invoke when I dare to dream of cities at their best; the one in which our collective will sets the groundwork upon which our cities forms and function are determined. Even my practical understanding of cities doesn’t seem to jive with the idea that what we seek to avoid, would be thrust upon us.

The obvious reason for this discrepancy between the desired city and the actual city is that there is a lot of money being made on advertising content, and more importantly on the spaces that it occupies. Like so many aspects of our lives, the public environment itself has been monetized, and it would appear against our better judgment. As unfair as that might seem, this impropriety pales in comparison to the fact that the money being made through the sale of our shared public resource is done so by selling you and your attention to companies intent on capturing it.

Your eyes are worth money and unwittingly you have become a product being bought and sold between commercial media companies and the businesses that they sell your public environment to. When looked at so plainly it doesn’t make sense to me that there would be advertising in public space at all for the simple reason that it uses a personal resource, to do something against our collective will, in order to benefit someone else.

The false justification for outdoor advertising:

The prevailing logic behind advertising (and why we allow our cities formal arrangement to defy common sense) is that it pays for something we want in return for the nuisance of being distracted for someone else’s purpose. Public space adheres to this same logic and we are asked to believe that advertising is an integral part of maintaining our cities infrastructure. While advertising revenue is significant, the idea that advertising is a necessary evil we must endure in order to keep our trains running falls apart under closer scrutiny. Immense profits are extracted from our cities by out of home media giants like JCDecaux that defy the assumption advertising is anything more than a way to turn the city into a profitable venture. If advertising were truly intent on nourishing underfunded public good, we would see to it that all of the profits were invested back into our city, and this is simply not the case.

Instead, the city is auctioned off and deals are made on our behalf to share portions of the revenue made from the attention we didn’t want to put on offer in the first place. So comfortable have we become with this inequitable deal that we have given up on the simple expectation of reciprocation from advertising, fully conceding that advertisings presence is just a part of modern life.

Illegal advertising, ephemeral marketing, brand engagement events, and a spectacular array of advertising techniques that fly under the radar of public policies attempting to capture small portions of public advertising revenue, run rampant in our cities. The premise that advertising should be endured because it provides a public service is simply false.

An informed critical response:

So I go out and remove ads without thought to the legality of my actions, but with an understanding of their justness when perceived from a practical perspective. I do so because like so many other forms of civil disobedience aimed at private property, it calls attention to an aspect of society that I think warrants closer inspection, but which is difficult to approach through more traditional channels of democracy.

Given my concerns about the effects of advertising on our ability to fully live as mindful conscientious citizens, which is borne out in social and psychological research, addressing the issue in a way that will result in advertisings removal, is my top priority. I have chosen to do so through civil disobedience, but there are more traditional methods available that I have forsaken and a brief explanation of why is important to answer if we want to get to the heart of what good comes of ad-takeover work.

Like many cities, New York controls the proliferation of outdoor advertising by permitting both the companies that operate outdoor advertising businesses, as well as the individual signs when applicable. This allows cities to keep some semblance of control over public space, while demanding revenue in the form of contractual agreements and yearly fees.

In 2009 I became aware that the NYC Department of Buildings had put its records online in an easily searchable database. This allowed me to look up the legality of many of the signs that looked down on our streets and to eventually realize that a company called NPA City Outdoor was operating hundreds of locations without permits, and therefore illegally. I began the painstaking process of calling the DOB Sign Enforcement Unit, tasked with policing outdoor advertising offenses, to report the illegal signage as I came upon it.

This exhaustive and lengthy process began to turn the slow wheels of justice and I watched as violations and fines were levied against each offending location. The problem was that none of the signs came down and it became clear to me that the city itself was not prepared to take on the legal might of a business with the deep pockets afforded by advertising revenue. Legal channels alone were simply not enough to combat this problem.

I then organized a large-scale civil disobedience project called NYSAT that would illegally, but very publicly, condemn the company by bringing out hundreds of citizens to whitewash all of their billboards and replace the imagery with public artworks. It was hoped that through media attention and a little bit of embarrassment, we could grease the wheels of justice and set in motion a series of events that would eventually lead to the actual removal of the illegal signs and the company operating them.

This is exactly what happened and I watched with excitement as NPA City Outdoor began a five-year battle with New York that they would eventually lose. Addressing legal advertising with these same tactics would be harder, but it seemed that prompted by a little civilian led direct action, the legal structures we had in place could actually reign in advertising and begin to remove advertising from public space entirely.

I don’t believe I could have been more wrong. Within a year of NPA loosing their court battles and removing most of their signs from the streets of NYC, their advertising tactics were tweaked and they began operating in the city once again. It was at this point that I came to realize that the profits for advertising were too great to maintain any real enforcement of the publics will. In fact, cities themselves were helpless despite strict rules and regulations; only a full change in public opinion towards advertising in public space would result in the changes I wanted to see.

So I returned to my tactics of removing advertising from public space without permission and attempting to promote similar civil disobedience amongst my peers. I did so less because I thought that this was the road to full removal of advertising from public space, than because it was all I had left.

Though it would appear disheartening, I quickly realized that my goal when doing ad-takeover work should not be to remove the ads themselves but to question the medium more generally. What we are doing when we do ad-takeover work is not righting any wrong, but using the medium itself to question its perceived authority in the hopes that those watching will think more deeply about the schism between what they want and what they see in front of their eyes.

In fact, to say this is accomplished through individual advertising takeovers is a little bit of self deception as most advertising takeovers go unnoticed. What we are truly trying to accomplish when we do advertising takeovers is change public opinion, and that task is done through personification and our lived experience. Like most civil disobedience against private property, my continued disregard for outdoor advertising in general and the rules that govern right and wrong in relation to it, allows me to be a focal point upon which the issue can be discussed more deeply.

Through discussion comes understanding, and through understanding comes belief, and what I believe is that cities can be better.

Sounds Like A Manifesto

I think it’s important to question the monopolization of our public visual environment for commercial concerns and what that means for the determination of our collective social agenda. By privileging one type of message over another, we are through repetition, setting the terms of our cultural and political discourse. Considering the great hurdles we face socially and environmentally, the commercial discourse we surround ourselves with not only ignores our current reality but actively works against it by distracting us from each other in favor of ourselves.  This deception, taking place in public space, makes the offense all the more malevolent as our shared environment must function as a place in which collectivity can manifest. Instead the predominant messages and cultural values we enforce in public space actively appeal to our individuality and or commercial segmentation. True holistic visions of society that include the economic and social justice at the heart of real societal reform lie outside of capitalism and thus the corporate media agenda that we allow unfettered access to our shared pubic spaces. By reclaiming our streets and demanding a public visual landscape that reflects the publics concerns over a commercial agenda, we call upon a prized and shared civic resource to host the revolution once again.

Ad-free art on the underground: Düsseldorf's 'pure' new metro line

These days, our public spaces are thought of as opportunities to tap into the vast wealth of attention that we collectively possess as we move through our shared environments. Typically that attention is directed towards advertising and our thoughts are asked to ruminate on our relationship to the automobile we drive, the type of detergent we wash our clothes in, or the entertainment we will use to pass the hours post dinner and pre sleep. Public space as a vehicle to promote conspicuous consumption, and this demand of our attention for specified motivations can leave us feeling intruded upon, taken advantage of, or manipulated. It makes sense because this is precisely what is happening, although we might not couch it in such terms, having become so comfortable with advertising's ever presence in our lives, and particularly in our public. The truth of the matter is we are being used when we step out of the house and that is no way to be treated in a space which is at least partially your own.

The recent opening of several new train stations in Dusseldorf, Germany seems to deeply understand this idea, as well as the power of art to expand ones attention as opposed to focusing it singularly.

"What is perhaps most inspiring about the project is how the lack of adverts means people can be people, and not consumers. Klussmann says: “Art is often used to attract people to buy things.” But here it is just about the art and the space, and wherever your imagination takes you. "

This notion reminded me of an obvious little piece of advice that in the digital age we fail to recognize and surely follow. Our minds need, in fact thrive on down time, those moments in between when our attention is unfocused and our thoughts drift. It is in these moments of drift that my mind makes new connections and novel thoughts bubble up to the surface without prompting. In the age of smartphones, we are woefully inept at allowing ourselves these moments of drift as we incessantly check Facebook, Instagram, Feedly, or some other constantly updating source of attention fodder attempting to fill those down moments.

Public space treated correctly can allow our minds the space to drift, or it can be used as a vehicle to distract us and keep our minds mulling over the minutia of capitalism. It seems like we should demand the later as it is in our best interest, and yet a newly minted subway system like this one in Dusseldorf is a noteworthy anomaly.

VIA: The Gaurdian

It was an unusual project,” says Berlin-based artist Heike Klussmann, a lead designer of the new U-Bahn line, which opens on Saturday in the German city of Düsseldorf. Fifteen years in the making, the Wehrhahn metro line consists of six new stations running east to west beneath the city centre, collaboratively designed by architects, artists and engineers. “Normally the construction part happens first and then the artists are commissioned. Here the architects, artists and engineers worked together from the beginning,” she says. More [HERE]

Image of the Stockholm subway as another example of Germany's progressive use of thier public spaces.

Street Art, The Law, Advertising, The City

I finally had the chance to read Alison Young's Street Art, Public City: Law Crime and the Urban Imagination. Its a wonderfully researched investigation into the legal barriers broken by situational art in public space and how those transgression can envision an alternative city or way of being. For me it pins a lot of the same tactics discussed in Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership by Sonia Katyal, on street and graffiti writers, which I have always felt appropriate. For anyone interested in street art and its politics beyond the image, this book is a must read.

Upon speaking to a PhD Student in London, I also found my way to a very interesting paper by Anne M. Cronin entitled "Advertising and the metabolism of the city: urban space, commodity rhythms". This paper is the first I have come across that looks beyond a textual critique of advertising in outdoor space and instead looks at the ways in which it shapes the city and its inhabitants by co-opting the rhythms of public movement. I can't recommend this short paper enough to anyone who is interested in understanding how the very presence of commercial media in public space regardless of the specific messages, can cause a change in our social behavior and link us closer to the cycles of commodity consumption. Download [HERE]

Augmented Reality and New Gallery Works

The works presented below should also be viewed with a free augmented reality app, PublicAdCampaign Now! downloadable for Android [HERE]. 

I have been working on a new series of gallery pieces that focus on my long term struggle to take back outdoor advertising spaces without imposing my own aesthetics on the public or running an ad campaign for myself, while at the same time making visible my tactics in the hopes of promoting similar behavior in others. I do this to ask whether or not we should adorn our cities with commercial messages in light of the many other types of visual stimulus we could offer ourselves, and with the understanding that advertising in general has a net negative effect on our personal psychology and thus our global behavior as a species. 

These works are as close as I think I have come to reaching that goal for a number of reasons. First, while people who are familiar with my work may look at these installations and assume it was me, I think thier utter simplicity anonymizes my actions and prevents the installation from being promotional. If you don't know who made the piece, you cant think about the person behind it and therefore must instead have a relationship to the image alone. That said, you must notice the installation in the first place and I think the striking difference between the imagery used for this series, and advertising, helps to create that initial interaction. 

So now we have someone looking at an anonymous installation that removed an advertisement for some unknown reason. This is the space I want the viewer to end up, as it allows them to begin the conversation with themselves about the difference between the two types of imagery, advertisings ubiquity and role in our public spaces, and all of the other questions we should be asking ourselves when thinking about how we want our public visual environment to be used. Given the opportunity to disassociate these physical locations with thier expected advertising content, viewers are free to enter a line of thinking that is almost unheard of... "Should we have, and do we need, outdoor advertising intruding on our public spaces and minds? 

While the initial performative aspect of these pieces works on the public viewer, these images are ultimately meant to hang in a gallery context, potentially loosing the credibility, and directness of the illegal physical takeover that is the proof of my ambitions. After all, these images are very clearly composites, a single moment created by compiling many hours of patient waiting into a single frame. If the images have gone through photoshop, what prevents the actual installation from being a fraud, and the proposed argument that the document depicts undeserving of our attention.

For this, the final element of AR, and the PublicAdCampaign Now! app come in to tell the rest of the story. Video of me actually installing the piece which is to become the image you are looking at in the gallery plays over the still image when viewed through the app, proving the aesthetics to be in service of the idea and the work to be sincere. Once this sincerity is established, I think the gallery viewer can come to a similar thought trajectory as the public viewer and honestly consider the proposed argument that is established by me actively breaking the law to remove commercial media and replace it with something else, whatever that might be.

Find Your Beach by Zadie Smith

VIA: NYRB by Zadie Smith

"Across the way from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis." More [HERE]

Fresh Milk TV Interview.

A big thanks to Freshmilk.tv for the interview and for Open Walls Gallery for setting it up and hosting a fantastic two man show with Vermibus. I think the questions Freshmilk asked prompted some honest answers, and other than my obnoxious use of the word "pupeteering", I think my thoughts are well reflected in this piece.

Group Battles New York Transit Over Ad Censorship

The posting here at PublicAdCampaign has been decidedly less political lately, and that is in part because it is just hard to keep all the balls in the air at anyone time, and so some aspects of the project suffer when others get more attention.

With that said, below is a little press release about an ad related to horse drawn carriages, that is not being allowed to appear in the NYC subway system. Recently the MTA has adopted a limited ability to censor ad content if it is deemed to be political. This is in large part due to ads related to the Jewish/Palestinian conflict that have used the subway advertising platform for some pretty hateful messages. The fact that this limited censorship is now being applied to a less aggressive ad campaign that isn't even outright political, shows the slippery slope the MTA has put itself on.

We can argue for days whether or not it is in the publics interest to limit the speech we see while traveling our underground rivers, but that is not what is interesting to me about this particular situation. What I find amazing is that Outfront Media, the outdoor advertising company that operates the vast network of ads within the subway system, is the one making the censorship call.

With a vested interest in using the subway system for commercial advertising only, tasking Outfront to determine what is, and what is not, appropriate free speech within thier network of advertising, is bound to result in aggressive censorship of anything non commercial. Now I am not saying that Outfront would have a policy to support this, but they do have a business model which is about making money and not engaging the question of how we use public space for public speech in the best way possible. Thier default reaction, and rightly so, is to keep things simple and pass on any "ad" which does not comply to a neat definition of what is acceptable use of our public advertising infrastructure, mainly commercial.

This is what happens when we allow OOH advertising to control the our visual public landscape and the messages which are put there. Thier interests are simply not aligned with the public's and therefore over time, the publics interests are left behind for the interest of those in charge, Outfront. Advertising in public space itself is not the end of our visual public dialogue, but given enough time and complacency, advertising will envelop all other forms of speech and leave our public spaces commercial opportunities and nothing more.

VIA: Marketwired

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - May 20, 2015) - The Metropolitan Transit Authority has rejected a PSA billboard about the dangers of horse-drawn carriages, submitted April 30 by nonprofit animal rights organization Last Chance for Animals. In response, LCA has hired prominent First Amendment Attorney Floyd Abrams to protect their constitutional right to free speech. More [HERE]

The Cost of Paying Attention

I have always said, if not slightly in jest, that advertisers should pay for the space they take up in my mind. More specifically outdoor advertisers, as thier messages are forced into my brain without my consent and therefor occupy a special subsection of crap that fills my thoughts. If I hum a pudding jingle that I saw on TV, it is my own fault for letting that message creep into my mind in exchange for a little sitcom induced brain shutdown. If I cant seem to get the image of a 4 story overly sexed Justin Bieber out of my mind, I have only Calvin Klien and Outfront Media to blame for that intrusion. 

It is with that thought that I post this NY Times article by Mathew B. Crawford. His argument, which is stated eloquently but isnt particularly new, is that we should treat our visual landscape like any other resource. We protect our air and water for the common good and the visual landscape that we share in public should be treated similarly so that the rampant abuse of that space does not cause negative economic or health issues for the population at large. I couldn't agree more. Mathew focuses his attention on an airport, which provides some nice examples of how our visual landscape is a worthwhile resource by juxtaposing the general airport with the paid lounges. If the wealthy are willing to pay for silence, or a lack of intrusion into thier visual landscape, it must have some worth.

Airports though, are both public and private spaces and while I couldnt agree more that they should be treated similarly to our shared city streets when it comes to visual pollution, actual public space has a more profound reason to remain commercial free. When we allow advertising to purchase the facades of our buildings, occupy our urban infrastructure, and generally access any and all of our shared environment, we lose something more than the valuable resource of silence. What we loose is access to our city and our literal ability to shape the environment we live in by visual interaction and cultural production.

"The street is a cultural space, one of the essential functions of which is to promote public interaction by facilitating self-expression. That’s a function that a space can have more or less, and it’s one that a space can lose."

If we allow advertising and commercial messaging to monetize the surface of our city, we loose access to those surfaces and with that our ability to define the cultural landscape in which we exist. To me this might be the most tragic loss due to public advertising but it surely isnt the only loss. Demanding an ad free public space is our right as citizens and of paramount importance as we continually define the objectives of our cities and the society that we want them to create. 

VIA: The NY Times

A FEW years ago, in a supermarket, I swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I watched the little screen, waiting for its prompts. During the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements. Clearly some genius had realized that a person in this situation is a captive audience. More [HERE]

Prince Media Keeps Illegal Sign Locations Visible With Art, Until They Don't.

Mark Samosonovich has some great new images up in Manhattan, (above) and Brooklyn, that will lighten your day and make you think at the same time. They are the kind of selfless public art that one wants to see everywhere. In fact there isn't even a name to distinguish who the artwork is by, and its this anonymity which makes these works a pleasure to take in. That said, all of these artworks went up at the same time, in places where Prince Media once ran advertising. The coincidence seemed worth looking into because I didn't know too much about this particular "boutique" billboard company, and hey..that's what we do. 

In the past I have come to find that behind many, if not all "donations" of outdoor advertising space to artists and thier work, is a self motivated billboard company getting more from the deal than thier altruism would like to reveal. Tax deductions, percent for arts programs, and simple lack of business, can all motivate an outdoor ad company to "give" some of thier space to the arts. In fact a lack of commercial clientele is often a motivator for art in public spaces as companies attempt to keep thier stock lively and with content, when business slows down. None of these reasons make outdoor advertising companies look particularly kind, but aren't all that outwardly devious either. 

In New York, I have found one other far more insidious reason that art finds its way onto outdoor advertising infrastructure, and that, I believe, is exemplified by Prince Media's recent donation of space for Mark Samosonovich. Often, advertising companies will put up signs without obtaining the proper permits from the city of NYC Department of Buildings. They will operate these illegal signs until the highly understaffed DOB finds thier offending signage and begins to levy fines against the company. This can take months, if not years, all the while said company is making money from the illegal sign. It just so happens that all 3 of the locations Prince Media offered for Mark's work were facing DOB sign violations, the most egregious of which can be seen [HERE]

Once a sign is found and a violation has been placed on the building to which the sign is attached, things become a little more serious and continuing to run commercial copy can be a bad idea for business. It is at this point that many outdoor advertising companies, and I believe in this case, Prince Media, offers the space to an artist. Art, not needing a permit, does not accrue more violations, allowing the sign to remain "active" while the company resolves the violation and any fines associated with it. Once a resolution is complete, its back to business as usual, and no more art. What in the beginning looked like a neighborly gesture, turns out to be a self interested ploy to keep potential clients aware of advertising infrastructure while violations and illegal activities are negotiated in court, tying up tax dollars and the DOB legal team. 

It is this type of false altruism that I continue to see practiced by the outdoor advertising industry that fuels my belief that monetizing our public walls is inherently problematic for a city. Leaving companies, whose intention is to make money from public eyes in public space, in charge of who gets access to our shared walls, does not work. The motivations are simply misaligned with the public's interests. 

Mark Samosonovich

Mark Samosonovich

PUBLICation from FORM in Perth, WA

PUBLIC was an wonderful arts and mural festival in Perth, WA that I took part in a few months ago. It brought together local and international artists to not only paint murals, but create programming and outreach that asked the public to contribute to a dialogue about how our cities are curated. Looking to make the festival a yearly event, Form created PUBLICation to speak to some of the issues address by the project, and gain some unique insight into the artists and thier processes. I was happy to contribute my thoughts about public space more generally and why a vibrant city street is key to a democratically oriented society. Read the digital version [HERE]

Strange Bedfellows - Art and Advertising in Dresden

The city of Dresden, along with Stroer outdoor advertising, is holding an open submission for artwork to be placed on 50 billboards around the city. It sounds like a good idea to bring more art to the streets and in the process eliminate a lot of advertising, if only briefly. The only problem is this initiative is promoted by an outdoor advertising company not in the business of making art happen, but rather money. Something must be amiss if they are offering free space. 

It seems that with the rise in popularity of street art and now this sub genre, developers and business interests are seeing a symbiotic relationship as opposed to an adversarial one. Instead of buffing graffiti and street art before plopping a bunch of condos down in an up and coming neighborhood, developers invite those same artists to "decorate" the area and give it the bohemian sheen they need to attract deep pocketed buyers. Once those condos are sold, the artists find that thier work is no longer needed and thier actions are again subject to the full extent of the law. Likewise with the anti advertising sub genre, billboard companies are inviting artists to use thier infrastructure in what I see as an effort to revitalize thier dying medium and bring new eyes to what most of us try to avoid like the plague. 

Like the old saying goes, "If you can't beat em, offer them professional exposure and watch as they abandon all of thier moral codes."

More [HERE]

If We Are Confessing Our Sins, I Stole This Image

I was reading through my favorite magazine, Cabinet, when I stumbled across the above image of a nun. I don't know what prompted me to do so, but I pulled out my phone, snapped a blurry picture and it ended up getting printed. I leave it to you on this Sunday afternoon to determine what the extent of my sins are.

New OX Work And My Deep Hypocrisy

I realize I am so overly biased that my criticism of advertising takeover artists' work isn't very credible. Despite that misfortune,  OX never ceases to amaze me and I think it deserves some attention. OX's work breaks all of my self imposed rules over and over again, is subtle and yet not, and is always zigging when I think it will zag.

In this recent piece OX includes seven brand names, any one of which would have sent me into a furur in past readings of ad takeover work, either by himself or any other artists. Leaving the brand name is like leaving the ad, not only does it defeat the purpose of doing ad takeover work in the first place, but it subconsciously aligns the brand with a subversive art happening. (OX's choice of tire brands helps to prevent this type of association) All in all though, its a bad look. I'm also not too keen on artists using ad takeovers as an opportunity to promote thier name or brand. Websites and hashtags are an egregious misuse of an opportunity for quality civil disobedience, but using your name can also get tired and make the work about you individually as opposed to public space more generally.

I also tend to want ad takeover work to stay away from the use of imagery which could be misconstrued as advertising and therefore passed over by audiences. ( I am getting more lax about this rule in my own work but it is still an important consideration) Noticing an ad takeover has happened is the first step to a dialogue about advertisings place in our shared public environment. My thinking is it is hard enough to get viewers to engage your work in ad spaces, so why make it any more confusing than it has to be. Here OX puts a damn tire in an image that has seven tire manufacturers logos in it. For all intents and purposes this is an advertisement and yet it just isn't.

OX turns these shortcomings into advantages by using each infraction for a particular purpose. The use of brand logos, iconography, and his own name only serve to enhance the pieces overall impact, allowing him to get away with the equivalent of ad takeover murder. It is frustrating and wonderful to see OX working so deftly.

As mentioned above, the two tire images spell out OX's name, which is a motif he has used in the past, but relatively sparringly, and I never thought it his best work for stated reasons. This use is different. Here OX's name hovers over the seven brand names almost the way a larger throw up might trump all the smaller names underneath it simply by its placement above the others. The names/brands underneath serve to exalt the one name on top and it is important in this context that OX uses logos as these are the names of our commercial public personalities. While this might not be exactly the way name recognition and graffiti hierarchy are actually decided within the community, thats the way it looks to an outsider and I cant help but draw the similarities to what OX is doing here. Using the brand, his name, and finally the iconography of the brands themselves to spell his name, is a complex criticism of who should have power in public space and for a moment a demonstration of what that proper distribution might look like.

All in all the work comes off as a deft acrobatic balancing routine in which OX toys with the brand supremacy by conquering them in both size and space, does so by transmuting thier own imagery or product to serve as the medium of his names construction, all while walking a thin line between obvious ad takeover work, and oddly conceived legitimate advertising campaign. Despite my rules, I want to believe that this piece can be seen by the untrained eye, does not serve to reinforce any brand despite the use of thier logos, and does not cross promote those brands by associating subversive art practices with them. I want to believe this because if that is true, to the trained eye this piece is wonderfully complex and yet another proof that art in public space can be a thoughtful and engaging experience in the way advertising never can.

Who Owns The Streets? Its Not Us

VIA Vandalog
This is a very nicely rounded articulation of the push and pull between the individual and the community in public space. The streets are a vibrant playground where self expression and the need for communication with your environment, comes in conflict with societies desire to curate and on some level control our shared visual space. The problem is this is an idyllic scenario, and conflict of the future. Currently this push and pull between the individual and the community takes place within an environment ruled by corporate messaging. This incredibly unfair power distribution between corporate interests and community interests, serves to reinforce a visual environment that is dominated by a singular capitalist message. We have come to fully accept that a majority of the visual landscape will be sectioned off for corporate messages in the form of bilboards, bus shelters, free standing, phone booths, wallscapes, lollipos, etc. We do this by perpetuating a system of private property ownership that biases access to our visual landscape to those with money. Without breaking that system of dominance in our visual landscape, the fight for self expression vs community interests will be undertaken within a larger context of cultural domination by corporate agendas. It would seem our conversations about tolerance will be overshadowed by a devotion to the images that surround us and the consumerist ideologies which are tearing at our social fabric and the very planet we live on.  

Ed Ruscha - the "Your Space" Series

Ed Ruscha

These Ed Ruscha drawings aren't ad takeovers, but they reminded me of a series of photographs that I want to take, but likely never will. In NYC, billboards along the BQE have been in legal limbo for quite some time. In fact I think at this point they have actually been abandoned by the ad companies, although im not positive. The structures sit empty, giant black or white blank canvases on the horizon. Some of them aren't even faced, and their skeletons loom large as you drive this major thoroughfare through Brooklyn. The landscapes these empty signifiers create by juxtaposing themselves against the dense background of the city is beautiful, and ripe for your imagination. Happy to drive by them when chance permits, I'd like to capture their power over the landscape before they finally disappear. 

I found this example of someone else's take on the empty beauty HERE

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha

AN ART EVERYWHERE LOST OPPORTUNITY

Barbara Celis wrote an article for El Pais on the first NYSAT project way back when. Her deep understanding of the ethos of that project is reflected in her article on the recent Art Everywhere project in the UK. It's not about a moment of reflection but a fundamental change in our attitudes towards how we adorn our public environment and what types of imagery we deem safe for consumption. Have a read below. 

For two weeks Art Everywhere put British art blockbusters on billboards across the UK and got a large applause. For decades street art has colored our urban landscapes and it still gets demonized while advertising is tolerated in most urban landscapes. When we will be able to choose what we are forced to see? More [HERE]

Konbit Shelter: Sustainable building in rural Haiti

I dont usually post things which are not related to advertising and art in public space but on this christmas eve I am making an exception. The Konbit shelter project is a sustainable building project that Calledonia Curry, aka Swoon, began after the devastating earthquake in 2010. The crew is going back to continue their work and are running a kickstarter campaign to fund it. Callie is one of the most interesting and wonderful people I have had the pleasure to meet and her dedication to community building and outreach is unparalleled. If you have any money to give this holiday season, please consider donating to the Konbit Shelter project. I can promise you it will be money well spent. Please donate [HERE]

An Email Conversation with Brian Sterling - Part3

This is the third in a series of email conversations between myself and Brian Sterling of the OOH industry. If you haven't been following our conversation you can see the first post [HERE] and the second post [HERE].

Brian Sterling Response:

Jordan-

The way I see it, your argument boils down to two segments which I think you are incorrectly mixing: moral and social problems within the psyche of our human population and an overall disdain for OOH.
The bottom line is that while I share your concerns of over consumption and the problems with the social fabric of our generation, I have a hard enough time attributing these problems to larger, more prevalent forms of advertising (TV, radio, etc). I think you're giving this industry and advertising in general way too much credit: if all adverting had such a large impact on everyone, the company who makes BlackBerrys would not be on the verge of bankruptcy. Advertising at best can influence and reenforce tendencies and norms within our society; these tendencies and norms do not come from advertising.

I think the impact of Channing Tatum using an iPhone in a movie or the cool kid in school using one at lunch is exponentially greater than anything a billboard can project. While OOH may support and reenforce certain tendencies, we all have to look much deeper in ourselves as to what drives us to act in certain ways. Come on...is that Bacardi wildposting panel going to make you go to the liquor store and buy a bottle? Even when you don't even like Bacardi?!?!

Secondly, I also agree with you that there absolutely has to be limits and regulations on all forms of media, including OOH. If they left it up to us, you would be walking down a branded sidewalk every day! I absolutely, unequivocally reject the comparison of OOH to a coal plant. OOH does not cause bodily harm and the notion that ANY social norms that any advertising supports, for better or for worse, can be equally damaging as breathing in pollution is absolutely absurd. No matter how much you hate watching commercials, they will never directly give you cancer.

Which brings me to my last point: don't use the state of our social well being to support your personal disdain for OOH. If you don't like signage because you feel it degrades our physical surroundings, then just say that. Don't use "over consumption" to unfairly attack the specific OOH industry when the problem lies much, much deeper. You are mixing two very, very different discussions and issues into one attack and you are, quite simply, very wrong for doing so. If you removed virtually every single piece of OOH from the world, you would definitely have a neater, and arguably enhanced physical landscape. But the problems you talk about would still be there. When you go and illegally deface and vandalize phone booths and other transit media, don't pretend you are doing anything more than mounting an attack on what you personally believe to be ugly urban blight. If you really want to help improve the human social condition, go kill a few rappers. Stop TV shows and movies from depicting false realities to kids. Teach parents how to better prepare their kids for the real world. Because NO advertising has a stronger message than those three things.

Brian

On a side note- I think you're smart enough to know I'm never going to tell you where I work or divulge any personal information about myself, including my real last name. I'm sure you're a perfectly nice guy, but I would prefer to keep things at this level.

Jordan Seiler Response:

Brian,

I think we have come to the heart of the matter. While you seem to be concentrating your counter arguments around the fact that specific advertising campaigns may or may not "work", I am not talking about specific campaigns but the larger role advertising as a form of messaging (private or publicly transmitted) has on increasing our attention to consumer ideals. You say "Advertising at best can influence and reinforce tendencies and norms within our society; these tendencies and norms do not come from advertising." While I would tend to agree with this statement, the reinforcement might be exactly the problem with advertising, and our ability to opt out of that system of reinforcement a vital right.

Speaking about tobacco advertising and to this very point Rory Sutherland says, "While I can accept that the purpose of tobacco advertising was not to encourage people to smoke. I find it astounding that anyone could barefacedly suggest that cigarette posters seen everywhere did not serve to normalize the habit." To this point you may not see a Bacardi advertisement and run out for a bottle of rum, but the repetition of alcohol imagery does encourage a continued thought process around the consumption of alcohol. Similarly, and taken from a more macrocosmic view, the repetition of images that all point to consumption in its myriad forms encourages consumption more generally. Now this is not to say that consumption is bad, but given your opening statement you do agree that there are issues to be faced surrounding this topic.

You also say "While OOH may support and reinforce certain tendencies, we all have to look much deeper in ourselves as to what drives us to act in certain ways." I couldn't agree with you more. In many ways every person has to constantly negotiate the inner and outer moral landscape and come to their own conclusions about what being a reasonable and responsible person entails. I would tend to argue that with the prevalence of advertising as a medium in our lives, it indeed plays a role (however insignificant) in this very moral negotiation we are describing. With evidence (from previous conversations) pointing to advertising making this moral negotiation more difficult (and the fact that so little research has been conducted into the actual burden advertising puts on our social and ecological morals) it would seem that we might want to allow individuals to opt out of advertisings influence in an effort to retain control of these moral negotiations.

Now this is where I believe you find my opinions to become "comical" and "overly idealistic". I would argue that un burdening public space from commercial messages would allow us all an easier time negotiating the moral dilemmas that are at the root of our social and environmental issues. (I also believe that it would have other dramatic affects on public interaction and aesthetic transformations that would positively affect the city but that is for another argument) I do agree that I am making a bold statement and also an idealistic one, but that is not an argument to refute my claim. My statement only seems idealistic in a society where advertising, and particularly outdoor advertising is so entrenched in our expectations of how public space is used. With the PublicAdCampaign project I hope we can look past what we have come to expect from public space and forward to how we might make it more conducive to the society in which we all want to exist.

Back to more specific issues. You say "Secondly, I also agree with you that there absolutely has to be limits and regulations on all forms of media, including OOH. If they left it up to us, you would be walking down a branded sidewalk every day!" Yikes! this coming from inside the industry. I must say I have found over the years that you are most likely correct in this statement. Battles between city governments and the OOH industry have cost tax payers millions of dollars and are all an effort to defend public space from the desires of an industry intent on "branding every sidewalk". Seems like a senseless war most taxpayers would probably not want to wage if given the choice. An interesting example of this in NY is the wildposting business. A while back a company named NPA operated illegally in NY, recklessly ignoring the law and littering public space with OOH ads in the form of wheatpasted posters. The city cracked down on them several years ago levying fines and demanding they stop their illegal activities. At that point NPA dissolved, fired a whole bunch of people, and then re-opened as Contest Promotions with a smaller but legal inventory. As recently as last week I spoke with a Contest Promotions employee who was removing another companies posters that had been placed over their ads on thier legal wall. He told me that the renewed wildposting and the inter business rivalry that had brought him out to fix this location, was being done by other rogue companies likely made up in part by ex NPA employees. Does this sound like an industry that we can regulate or one that by its very nature will break the rules in an effort to control more of our visual environment.

It seems that my comparison of the advertising industry to the coal industry did not sit well considering you "unequivocally reject the comparison of OOH to a coal plant." Stating "OOH does not cause bodily harm and the notion that ANY social norms that any advertising supports, for better or for worse, can be equally damaging as breathing in pollution is absolutely absurd". I admit that the two industries have a much different direct correlation to health, but if by the logic put forward before, advertising can reinforce tendencies which are already harmful, it might have a correlation to our health worthwhile considering. If our obesity epidemic is causing us serious bodily harm and advertising is increasing our tendency to eat in unhealthy ways, we might consider curbing those messages. We have done this in the past with alcohol and tobacco. The funny thing is I'm not even that extreme. My request is not to ban specific types of messages, but simply to omit advertising in public space, un burdening us from the worry of it increasing our tendency to become obese. If you wanna soak up McDonalds ads over the TV, go a head fatty, but I would kindly ask that I retain the option to remain outside of that influence.

And to wrap this whole things up. You seem to suggest that my disdain for OOH advertising is in some way misguided and that the real issues I am interested in lie within the social sciences and other activist campaigns that might more directly deal with the societal issues that I am blaming on advertising more generally. You say "If you removed virtually every single piece of OOH from the world, you would definitely have a neater, and arguably enhanced physical landscape. But the problems you talk about would still be there". I tend to agree with you on both points here but these problems, as you mention, are not isolated issues. The state of our social fabric is the result of an infinite number of small decisions and actions that we collectively make. Removing OOH advertising from public space seems like a step in the right direction albeit a very small one. That said it is the lens through which I have chosen to pursue my fight for a more properly functioning public space and by that a better society. I do think that advertising degrades our physical surroundings, but I also think it promotes a consumptive catharsis that has a net negative overall affect on all of us. However small my contribution to addressing this issue, there is at least a contribution.

And last, while I know you will not let our readers know your real name, this is an honest and productive conversation we are having. It would seem you share some of my own concerns about society and that there are real issues which must be dealt with. The fact that you are unwilling to reveal your name only makes me feel like you either do not fully believe what you are saying and are thus unwilling to stand behind your statements, or that there would be negative ramifications for you as a result of engaging in this type of dialogue. Either way is very troubling and speaks either to your disingenuousness, or to an industry which punishes its insiders for thinking about the industry that they are working within. I think the OOH industry can do more. When I "illegally deface and vandalize" phone booths and other transit media, I am not mounting a personal attack but trying to use my medium to create meaningful dialogue around this issue. Oddly enough it seems to be working. I use my name to speak to the sincerity of my beliefs and my interest, and however small my impact might be I believe it is worth my effort and a meaningful contribution to the fight for a more just and verdant world.  I will leave "killing rappers" to other "activists".

I look forward to your response!