introduction

culture jamming

political art

public interventions

mapping your reality

urban typos

activism

artivism

hacktivism

craftivism

case study: colombian grafica popular

THE BLF MANIFESTO

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In the beginning was the Ad. The Ad was brought to the consumer by the Advertiser. Desire, self worth, self image, ambition, hope; all find their genesis in the Ad. Through the Ad and the intent of the Advertiser we form our ideas and learn the myths that make us into what we are as a people. That this method of self definition displaced the earlier methods is beyond debate. It is now clear that the Ad holds the most esteemed position in our cosmology.

BILLBOARDLIBERATION

FRONT

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LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH BLF

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Advertising suffuses all corners of our waking lives; it so permeates our consciousness that even our dreams are often indistinguishable from a rapid succession of TV commercials.

Different forms of media serve the Ad as primary conduits to the people. Entirely new media have been invented solely to streamline the process of bringing the Ad to the people.

Old fashioned notions about art, science and spirituality being the peak achievements and the noblest goals of the spirit of man have been dashed on the crystalline shores of Acquisition; the holy pursuit of consumer goods. All old forms and philosophies have been cleverly co-opted and re”spun” as marketing strategies and consumer campaigns by the new shamans, the Ad men.

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Spiritualism, literature and the physical arts: painting, sculpture, music and dance are by and large produced, packaged and consumed in the same fashion as a new car. Product contents, dictated by trends in hipness, contain a half-life matching the producers calender for being

supplanted by newer models.

Product placement in television and film have overtaken story line, character development and other dated strategies in importance in the agendas of the filmmakers. The directors commanding the biggest budgets have more often than not cut their teeth on TV Ads & music

videos.

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Artists are judged and rewarded on the basis of their relative standing in the ongoing commodification of art objects. Bowing to fashion and the vagaries of gallery culture, these creators attempt to manufacture collectible baubles and contemporary or “period” objects that will successfully penetrate the collectors market. The most successful artists are those who can most successfully sell their art. With increasing frequency they apprentice to the Advertisers; no longer needing to falsely maintain the distinction between “Fine” & “Commercial” art.

And so we see, the Ad defines our world, creating both the focus “image” and the culture of consumption that ultimately attract and inspire all individuals desirous of communicating to their fellow man in a profound fashion. It is clear that He who controls the Ad speaks with the voice of our Age.

You can switch off/smash/shoot/hack or in other ways avoid Television, Computers and Radio. You are not compelled to buy magazines or subscribe to newspapers. You can sic your rotweiler on door to door salesman. Of all the types of media used to disseminate the Ad there is only one which is entirely inescapable to all but the bedridden shut-in or the Thoreauian misanthrope. We speak, of course of the Billboard. Along with its lesser cousins, advertising posters and “bullet” outdoor graphics, the Billboard is ubiquitous and inescapable to anyone who moves through our world. Everyone knows the Billboard; the Billboard is in everyones mind.

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Fresh out of graduate school and unhappy doing web design work in order to pay back student loans I applied for a fellowship position at the Eyebeam OpenLab, a non-profit art and technology research and development lab in Manhattan. The applica-tion asked for two work samples and a series of questions related to creativity and open source. I applied with Graffiti Analysis and Explicit Content Only, and based on the strength of graffiti and cur-se words, I was asked to join an elite group with three other hacker types with backgrounds ran-ging from NASA to MIT. The position came with a small but livable salary and health insurance, and allowed me to focus solely on my work for what ended up being a period of two years. Admitte-dly feeling like the wild card choice amongst the group, I quit my job and continued doing projects related to graffiti, open source, and popular cultu-re. After 4 or 5 months I started collaborating with an ex-robotics contractor for NASA named James Powderly. James was an engineer with a tenden-cy towards deviance and when he saw that I was using technology to create graffiti tools for the modern vandal, he quickly dropped everything and lent his engineering, hardware, and materials expertise.

We made a good team and quickly came up with a simple way to combine an LED, a magnet, and a small battery into a new self illuminating me-dium for graffiti artists. The LED Throwie was our first big collaborative hit and it was shortly after the development of this device that we donned the name Graffiti Research Lab and decided to conti-nue this strain of research as a team. Early on we decided the G.R.L. would have two main goals: 1) to produce and release cheap, easy, and functional tools for urban communication, and 2) to use gra-ffiti as a medium to spread open source ideals into popular culture. All G.R.L. projects are released for free with detailed HOW TO guides and source code so that people can implement them on their own and for their own purposes. In an effort to try and trump the success of Throwies we joined forces with British artist, friend, and programmer Theo Watson to create Laser Tag, a system that allows writers to draw at a very large scale onto buildings in light using a small pen sized laser. It is to date our most widely utilized project, with activist groups, graffiti wri-ters, and nerds putting it to various uses in cities as far as Singapore and as close as Rochester.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH GRL

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WK AT STEREO-GRAPH

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LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH WK

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Culture Jamming wk at stereograph16

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PETER FUSS

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There are a variety of takes art writers and bloggers have on Fuss’ “Who Killed Barack Obama” series, a public mural in the streets of Warsaw depicting an assa-sinated Barack Obama. The work has evoked anger, support, surprise, and a few people who saw the work and believed that the event had actually happened. What I find most interesting is reading the comments on blogs talking about this series. Internet commentors bring up Sheperd Fairey’s Obama posters and shirts and call them opportunistic. The same is said of this work. //Fuss wants attention. Fuss is playing with premonition and shouldn’t dare//. Political art in the contemporary climate generally receives a chilly if not hostile reaction from the art community unless said political work is specifically sanctioned by one of the blue chip taste makers of today. Even then it is subject to general suspicion. These factors coupled with a Banksy induced “clever street art” backlash leads me to want to defend this work on it’s visual impact alone.

Also, to deny an artist the ability to talk about politics denies the artists some es-sential roles. Should we allow only politicians to talk politics? What exactly then is the role of art ? Those of us who don’t mind existing on the fringes of art town find ourselves defending political work more and more. But as the role of political art has somehow stayed the same at a time when an unprecedented amount of inter-est is shed upon the US election, Fuss “who Killed Barack Obama” series speaks for itself even to those who believe it says nothing.

The work is striking, public, and controversial because it shouts what is only whis-pered and plays upon our fears and our hopes. The billboards and shirts of this series are of added interest because they come from a European voice. It seems that the European populus has embraced Obama as a cult of personality and speaks of their hope and ambitions for a battered cross Atlantic relationship.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH PETER FUSS.

BY JAMES DAVID (GROUNDSWELL TALKS)

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Such statements are nothing new to Fuss. His often illegaly placed billboards can be seen throughout Poland and Europe. He covers up existing, paid commercial billboards with his own visual and written statements. An interesting intervention on advertising. Fuss is like Patrick Mimran without funding. (For those who haven’t been to New York’s West Chelsea art district, Mimran buys billboard spaces to make various statements about the art world) Fuss’ style is undeniably young but his appeal is the same as his successful street predecessors in that the work is con-sistently striking and provocative.

As the story goes, a couple on holiday passed into a nearby shop in distress. They had not heard the news that Barack Obama had been killed. They had been on the road and not plugged in to the news. The foreshadowing of events that have not occurred put on display our human superstitions about mentioning what we fear. More importantly it manifests in blatant, public form, the actual pervading fear that Barack Obama is a realistic target for assassination. It also demonstrates an increased global interest in the outcome of a US election. I hardly believe McCain, Palin, or even Hillary Clinton have anything to do with this. When art approaches the subject of such a transcendent “cult of personality” figure the subject matter of work becomes more important than the work itself. This applies even in this case, where the work itself is very good and opens such political work to very easy criticism.

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IN BARCELONA

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Eva and Franco Mates - internationally known as 0100101110101101.ORG - are a couple of restless European con-artists who use non-conventional communication tac-tics to obtain the largest visibility with the minimal effort. Born in 1976, they live and work in situ.

They have been pioneers in the net.art mo-vement remixing famous digital artworks and performing Life Sharing: a real-time digital self portrait, during which they sub-mitted to satellite surveillance for an enti-re year.In the last decade they have been devoted to what they define as “media actionism”, creating unpredictable mass-scale perfor-mances staged outside of the traditional art context and involving an unaware au-dience, where truth and falsehood become indistinguishable. They invented and pro-moted a nonexistent artist; spread a com-puter virus as a work of art; challenged and defeated Nike Corporation in a legal battle for a fake advertisement campaign.

They have been called media scammers, myth-makers and extremists as well as Internet stars, info-dandies or, simply, ge-niuses.

Their works have been shown internatio-nally including: Postmasters Gallery, New York; Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ICC, Tokyo; Manifesta, Frankfurt; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Generali Foundation, Vienna; Ars Electronica, Linz; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Valencia Bien-nial.

They received the Jerome Commission from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and are among the youngest artists ever to participate in the Venice Biennale.

Mattes’ works are part of several private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and MEIAC, Spain.

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