Vermibus - In Absentia from Vermibus on Vimeo.
Vermibus just released a beautiful new video shot by the talented Xar Lee, called In Absentia. It features his fashion image abstractions in the beautiful Paris subway setting, accompanied by soothing seductive audio. It is a short and seductive look into large scale public project, and of course I also love the fact that the dramatic ending happens at Jourdain station.

He writes. "Deliberating various imposed standards, Vermibus has built a recognizable oeuvre, which culminates with his project entitled “In Absentia”. Works from the project unveil another introspective layer of Vermibus’ work, where macrocosms of consumerism intertwine with microcosms of the artist’s subjective journey into the depths of the self. The project began with the creation of 21 solvent-based posters, each of them bearing an individual inspiration and significance, hidden in the title. As a crown of the series, Vermibus produced an atmospheric video, an autonomous work of art, a clear step forward from the documentary short films he was creating to date. “In Absentia” video is a brooding visual tale about urban life, cleared of every and any distraction, including people, alluding to a plethora of issues the citizens face daily, from visual pollution to personal loneliness. Inspired by one of the biggest subway systems in Europe, the Parisian Metro, the artist installed all the posters on the scene, where the video was shot as well. Asking some of the crucial questions about present reality in the post-truth world, “In Absentia” opened a possibility to observe Vermibus’ work in broader context, surpassing the realm of public urban art."

Vermibus Website [HERE]

A Definitive "How To" Guide Brought To You By Brandalism

Beyond helping spearhead one of the largest anti-advertising campaigns to date under the umbrella agency Subvertiser's International along with Vermibus, Kyle Magee, Proyecto Squaters, and many others, Brandalism just released this definitive guide to ad hacking. Get started creating your own cultural discourse in lieu of commercial concerns by downloading the "How To" guide [HERE]

NOAD Day 2016 - November 27th

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN:
November 27th (anytime)

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

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

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

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

Is the Poster Dead, or Just Remediated?

I am extremely excited to be a part of the 50th Warsaw International Poster Biennale coming up this June. A huge thanks to Vermibus for introducing me to David Crowley, the curator and mind behind this unique exhibition which looks like as if it will honor the posters role in political activism while investigating the new forms it has taken in an increasingly digital, and mediated environment. 

Professor David Crowley, Head of Critical Writing in Art & Design, has a long-term research interest in the poster as both a design object and a means of communication. RCA Blog talked to David about his curation of the fiftieth Warsaw International Poster Biennale in June 2016, and the changing faces of poster design and dissemination in the digital twenty-first century. More [HERE]

Vermibus and I Installing In Berlin

Here is an image of Vermibus and I installing two pieces close to the Open Walls gallery in Berlin during the exhibition.

Grand Opening Exhibition At Openwalls Berlin

Recently I had the pleasure of exhibiting with my new friend Vermibus at Openwalls Gallery in Berlin. His work, like my own, takes advantage of the large outdoor advertising infrastructure in our public spaces in order to tease out questions of how we choose to adorn the cities we live in. Focusing on fashion imagery, Vermibus removes, reworks, and then reinstalls fashion advertising in public spaces. It is quite effective and given my background in the fashion photography world, something that I feel strongly about supporting.

While I was in Berlin I put up a few pieces, including a quick hit with Vermibus which saw us each take a single side of a two sided bus shelter. Once I get those images together I will make them available here.

Upcoming Berlin Exhibition July 3rd 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE GRAND OPENING: JORDAN SEILER (NYC) | VERMIBUS (Berlin) Celebrating its Grand Opening on July 3rd 2015, OPEN WALLS Gallery brings New York based Public Art pioneer Jordan Seiler together with European art activist Vermibus for a very special show, which consciously sets a statement against the superficial surface of today’s commercialized cityscapes and the visual pollution of outdoor advertising. Jordan Seiler already started to challenge the relationship between public spaces and commercial advertising while attending The Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 with his PublicAdCampaign, for which he took over billboards to use them as canvases for his own artworks. Over the years Seiler’s campaign has grown from an individual art project to a collective work, which peaked in the New York Street Advertising Takeover, where more than 100 participants replaced ads with artworks. Later he launched a digital equivalent with an App titled NO AD, which replaces NYC subway advertisement with curated artwork. Taking this idea even one step further Jordan Seiler and Vermibus joined forces for the NO AD DAY in November 2014, wherefore activists from all over the world were asked to remove outdoor advertisings, leaving plain white display cases as signs of the elimination of the commercial media behind. Just as in Vermibus’ individual work, in which the Berlin based artist removes ads and transforms the high gloss bikini beauties into deformed beasts, it’s the irritation of the common viewing habit that expresses his critique against the advertising industry. The OPEN WALLS Gallery Grand Opening show will gather a collection of recent works from both artists - including a multimedia segment by Seiler - as well as a photo series by Thomas von Wittich, taken from his “Dissolving Europe“ project, for which he followed Vermibus around the continent. An introduction to Ad-Busting and Public Art will be given by Jordan Seiler during the vernissage. Press & Private View Friday July 3rd. 17:00 - 18:00 Vernissage & Opening Ceremony Friday July 3rd. 18:00 - 22:00 Introduction Speech by Jordan Seiler Friday July 3rd. 19:00 Runtime 03.07.-29.07. Tuesday-Saturday 11:00-19:00 or by appointment (info@openwallsgallery.com) Additional press information, photos and video material is available upon request. Please email the gallery and we'll get back to you shortly.  http://www.vermibus.com http://publicadcampaign.com http://www.openwallsgallery.com Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe OPEN WALLS Gallery Schröderstr. 11.1 10115 Berlin

Interview For Tracks - Arte

Here is a little interview/video about the NO AD project and PublicAdCampaign in general. While I don't understand a good portion of this video, I am told it gets to the point quickly and explains the projects well. A big thanks to Tracks for including me in their programming. Oh and that billboard piece in the first frame below is OX, one of my favorite artists.
Jordan Seiler, zizanie dans le métro - Tracks ARTE by Tracks_ARTE

Ad Criticism and Public Space Activism in One - Vermibus Interview

photo by JUST

Vermibus came onto our radar a little over two years ago with some arresting ad busting imagery and the motivation to go big consistently. Initially I wasnt fond of the results because they weren't transformative enough. I still saw models and ad campaigns through the smeared inks. While the work was critical of the advertising content, it spoke nothing about public space and its use for a wide range of commercial messaging systems. This last component of ad takeover work is important to me and can be solved easily by simply denying the typical ad imagery a place in public space and re-appropriating that space for some non sequitur. By leaving the ad content in the final image, Vermibus' work didn't alleviate the commercial burden and therefor didn't free my mind to ponder other significant uses of public space.

I was wrong. Not only does Vermibus exhibit the wide variety of keys and tools he has made with which to access public advertising venues, but his campaigns are so large that the individual image is subsumed by the larger project. Both of these aspects of Vermibus' process adress the public space issues that I have come to expect in good ad takeover artists' work. The first aspect I think is obvious, but the second demands a bit of an explanation.

When I first started doing ad takeovers while I was attending RISD, one of the main dilemas I faced was that of authorship. How could I justify removing advertising if I was simply replacing it with advertisements of my own? This meant not only could I not sign my work, but that I became afraid to settle into one type of imagery for fear that a recognizable style would be as bad, or worse than simply signing my work. It was important to me that people see my ad takeovers not as a personal demand for more of my own space, but as an anonymous demand for space in general. And so it was decided that I would slowly seed the world with hidden gems that would be discovered, pondered, and then left to alter history in the smallest of ways, a weak gravity between two asteroids whose paths will change a distant planets history billions of years in the future.

Since then I have found that while this quaint personal activism has its merit, it has its obvious downsides, a slow march towards progress if ever there was one. Mobstr made it clear for me two years  ago in Stavanger at the NuArt festival, repetition and recognition had thier benefits. Stavanger is a small town and I was able to blanket the entire downtown area with only 32 takeovers. Acting over the course of two hours one night, there wasn't an advertisement left in downtown when Mobstr returned from his painting work elsewhere in the city. He explained that the continuous repetition of my imagery as he entered downtown, made him think about the shear number of ads and the burden with which they weigh on public space. For me this was a concrete reason for the imagery to be recognizable, at least within a single project.

While the individual images Vermibus puts up are ad criticisms, the fact that he often goes so large in a city causes the viewer to see the repetition of his images in the same way Mobstr saw my work, in a spatial dimension as opposed to a single location. Who cares if the viewer was still thinking about Calvin Klien, or H&M? They would also be confronted with the greater concern about the proliferation of these and other images within the larger public space context.  In some ways that makes Vermibus' work better than most because he manages to adress two separate concerns about advertising in public space at once. It's incredibly interesting work and the reason we just had to ask him a few questions for the PublicAdCampaign site. Enjoy

INTERVIEW:

1-When and why did you start doing advertising takeover work? 
1) I’ve been actively painting in the world of graffiti since 1998 but there was a time when my life changed and had taken a more personal way and at the same time with more social awareness. It was when I moved to Berlin in 2011 when I started taking things seriously about the public space. My anti-advertising work started almost right after I arrived to Berlin but I needed around a year to understand what I was doing. I think that being an ad buster is not only putting something on advertising spaces, but an internal change process in all senses.

2-Your work seems to both eliminate advertising, while simultaneously referencing the fashion iconography that is so prevalent in todays advertising imagery. Can you explain to PublicAdCampaign readers why you only work with fashion advertising outdoors? 
2) There are lots of people who have been talking for a long time about brands and their lack of ethics regarding their workers or a certain number of internal policies and the truth is that there are more people who can talk about this better than me. I come from the picture world and have always been very interested in the world of advertising iconography. In my last job as a photographer I had some bad experiences regarding what the beauty standards should be like and I took advantage of that situation to make a public reflection of what has affected me personally. On the other hand, after some time working just about fashion advertising I figured out advertising should be more aggressive but without being loutish, because the message is lost when there’s a destruction. The best way to do anti-advertising is just taking the ad away and not putting anything. That’s how the NO-AD project was born. By chance my first intervention on advertising was leaving it blank when I took the poster to work later on it, therefore NO-AD has always been pretty linked to my job. Now I follow both lines.

3-You exhibit the tools you use to break into outdoor advertising locations when you show your work, which leads me to believe that promoting access to public media space is part of your critique. Can you tell us your thoughts on the relationship between outdoor advertising and public space? 
3) As a graffiti writer I’m very attached to materials auto-production. A lot of us have done our own kind of markers or inks and I always saw it something very personal and nice to show, but in the world of graffiti there’s a lot of secrecy and it isn’t normal someone tells you how he makes the acid or which inks he has combined to get a certain colour or composition. I don’t mind showing my keys because I think it is a very personal part of my job and it’s nice to show them. I don’t have any kind of secrecy at the time of explaining how they are made, but the truth is I’m extremely careful of to whom I give that info because not all of them will use it for anti-advertising purposes. I don’t believe everyone is aware of what opening this shelter takes, what should be done or not and overall, I think you must have tried it by yourself before ordering the keys online as if you browse in Google. Whoever really wants to intervene advertising must make an effort trying it himself, otherwise he will not worth it in the same way as if he had been looking for his own way to do the key. Although I appreciate there are people like you who make keys at home because the less advertising there is, the better. One way or another that’s the final goal.

4-I noticed some of your gallery work is similar in process to your outdoor work, but uses fashion magazine advertising or photography. What is the relationship between your indoor and outdoor work? 
4) There’s no aesthetic difference, the process is more less the same on books, magazines or advertising. The difference is the used space. When I exhibit in a gallery I want people to focus on the plastic and emotional part of my paintings and not only on the fact that I intervene advertising on the streets. When I work on the streets I want people to focus on the activist part of my job and to think about throughout my art. More often than not I exhibit posters on the streets and put them in a gallery. That’s not strictly ad busting but it has something to see with anti-advertising because if there’s a poster hanged on a gallery means that there’s an empty advertising space on the streets.

5-What is your favorite story from your ad busting adventures? 
5) Making “Dissolving Europe” travelling was a great and intense experience in all senses and it is difficult to beat all the adventures we lived in those 18 days doing interventions every day. Bu there are also some other emotive moments such as conversations with people about what they think about the interventions, normally people completely unrelated with this movement…It is incredible all what they have to say, I have learnt a lot in all conversations I had. All those people have made me think about everything and grow both as an artist and as a person.

More from Vermibus [HERE]

Vermibus - Dissolving Europe

Vermibus "Dissolving Europe" from Vermibus on Vimeo. 

Vermibus is a Berlin based artist who removes advertising, alters it with a thinner, and then replaces those ads on the street to a ghostly affect. Somewhere between ad criticism and plain ad takeover work, his imagery rides a thin line and speaks to both. I cannot be happier to see Vermibus taking this medium to new heights by touring so heavily and being so damn productive. I think you will see a lot more of this artist in the coming years.

It is interesting to see a real sub genre of artists using outdoor advertising venues as their main medium. While these artists do have definitive styles of working, the outdoor ad venue is a vital component in their process. Artists like OX, Posterboy, and Vermibus are defining their practice around the alteration and ultimately their power over commercially based public media systems. I almost cannot believe it and hope that one day you might see even more artists working this way, walk into survey gallery shows, and hear talks about the unique history of this sub genre within the public art discourse. Only time will tell.

Vermibus Doing Amazing Work You Should Know About

Vermibus, a Berlin based ad takeover artist had a nice article on the Atlantic Cities website recently. His newest work, captured by photographer Just, is right there at Checkpoint Charlie, glaring back in all its bleakness. The process is great, and the results are quite beautiful. 

With this kind of placement I'm enjoying Vermibus as a relatively recent and strong addition to some amazing artists who happen to largely work over advertising. It's quite fantastic. Check out this process video below if you havent already seen it. 

Also see his No Ad project [HERE]