November 17, 2011
Posted by marc at 8:10 AM in Billboard Liberations |
October 19, 2011
"Loss of Strength
Whole country becomes a hole, it’s cracking not along the borders but along the people.
- Why does a man do what he does? Why does he kill, steal, rob? What makes a person like this? What makes him do what he does?
- Such man has a huge hole right in the center of him. He will never steal, kill or torture enough to fill it.
- So what does he need?
- Vengeance.
- For what?
- For the fact that he was born
People are weak point.
Some will fall apart, others will leave, and then everything will dissolve."... Radya
Posted by marc at 7:04 AM in Billboard Liberations |
August 22, 2011
Real? Or publicity stunt? You decide because we can't
More photos here.
Posted by marc at 8:03 AM in Billboard Liberations |
July 20, 2011
Posted by marc at 5:57 AM in Billboard Liberations |
July 5, 2011
More from Ludo here.
Posted by marc at 6:28 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 15, 2011
More from OX here.
Posted by marc at 7:03 AM in Billboard Liberations |
May 11, 2011
From id-iom:
‘I can remember when all this was fields’ sounds pretty much like something you would expect your grandad to say as you drive past the newest and most monstrous of shopping centres doesn’t it? With the seemingly endless stream of development around London town and the proliferation of advertising messages on just about every conceivable surface which are forced into our brain (without our permission) on a daily basis it’s sometimes nice to strike back with a simple message to bring a bit of levity to an otherwise tedious day.
To think there was a time (not that long ago) when there was a little more greenery about and that every single scrap of land wasn’t pounced on for yet another massive advertising hoarding (or completely uninspired housing development.) But then again, perhaps i’m just being a little sentimental.
Anyway, after doing a little reading into billboards I came across this interesting thread on a Brixton forum about illegal billboards. It seems that billboards are sometimes set up without planning permission whilst the companies doing it know they can make more than enough in advertising revenue to remove the boards or pay the fine when the council finally get round to identifying the culprit and doing something about it. Now, whilst the billboard we went on is probably entirely legal it was covered in blue paper which is definitely fair game in my eyes. And i’m sure i’ve suffered enough at their hands over time to make this the mildest form of payback."
Posted by marc at 6:58 AM in Billboard Liberations |
March 2, 2011
"Some strange ladies showed up in an awkward adspace-thing near our office.
So we decided to dress them up. "... J&J
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Posted by marc at 7:15 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 18, 2011
Posted by marc at 7:32 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 17, 2011
More here.
Posted by marc at 6:50 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 16, 2011
The great thing about Banksy is that you never know what to expect from him next. His most recent piece in LA: A Billboard takeover right on Sunset Boulevard.
Posted by marc at 2:17 PM in Billboard Liberations |
January 28, 2011
From a reader in Paris:
"The photo above is from Paris, France in June 2004 (at the time of the European elections) it is from the same artist as "Usher Simpson" shown in the Liberation Billboard section. The photographer of the photo is Dorothée Smith."
Posted by marc at 7:22 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 26, 2011
Artist: KD
Posted by marc at 7:42 AM in Billboard Liberations |
Posted by marc at 7:18 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 4, 2011
Translation: "Santa Claus Doesn't Exist"
Artist: Monotremu
Posted by marc at 6:29 AM in Billboard Liberations |
October 4, 2010
"this is a billboard for our parliamentary election - I thought about the lies the guy says all the time so I just wanted to restrain him a bit..I called it a silence of Fico's - His name - cos there were just too many of them as well...we did these in about four or five cities about 40 pieces ...yeah nice times...you know ...when you are young and stuff..."... prankster
Posted by marc at 6:42 AM in Billboard Liberations |
August 4, 2010
Posted by marc at 8:03 AM in Billboard Liberations |
July 13, 2010
Artist: OX
Posted by marc at 8:50 PM in Billboard Liberations |
July 7, 2010
Posted by marc at 7:46 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 20, 2010
Posted by marc at 3:19 PM in Billboard Liberations |
June 15, 2010
Posted by marc at 7:48 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 9, 2010
Freedom From Porn from Freedom From Porn on Vimeo.
Posted by marc at 7:43 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 1, 2010
Blushing Bride in Honfleur
In Honfleur, c'est la joie which rules. The soldier's got me by the leg, but I've got his eyeballs.
credit photo A. Breant
I Drip with In-dignity
My pyramids in order, I see you there and I know you.
Posted by marc at 7:31 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 13, 2010
Artist: Peter Fuss
Posted by marc at 10:59 PM in Billboard Liberations |
January 22, 2010
Posted by marc at 8:27 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 4, 2010
Posted by marc at 10:13 AM in Billboard Liberations |
December 21, 2009
Why is it ok to take down someone else's work (/advertisement) and put my work up instead:
The message of this work is not "buy! buy! buy!" it is "look, enjoy, think, like, don't like, form an opinion." It engages viewers in a dialogue which advertisements do not. Each piece of art put in a public space, in place of an ad, is an opportunity for viewers to reconnect with the space they inhabit.
I didn't sign this work:
If this poster were an advertisement for me-as an artist-it would be just as problematic as a conventional, legally paid for ad. Jordan Seiler uses this quote from Lewis Hyde's The Gift to describe his work: "unlike economic exchange, a gift has no expectation of return." As a gift to the city, I have no expectation that this work will garner recognition or accolades. It was a very small way to change a very large cityscape. It was perhaps a utopian gesture which has the potential to lead to more concretely efficacious ones.
Just getting my feet wet:
As I prepared for my project (reading about street art, about Jordan Seiler's work, about resident/public-space interaction) the holes in it became quite clear to me. I'm not sure such an obviously political work is the best use of reappropriated ad space; it's a case of the message is the medium; I think just putting a piece of art in a space conventionally used for advertisements is enough of a message itself. Or perhaps I just needed to put my work in a more specific location---out side the TimeWarner center or maybe even very close to a news stand. My lack of experience entering the instillation limited me in some ways in these options.
Posted by marc at 8:20 AM in Billboard Liberations |
November 6, 2009
Posted by marc at 7:34 AM in Billboard Liberations |
November 5, 2009
Posted by marc at 8:24 AM in Billboard Liberations |
October 11, 2009
"With more and more businesses being forced to close down, the sight of bare wood across the windows and doors is now commonplace and unsightly. By pasting the wooden panels with actual images, this problem is solved. "... James Reynolds
Posted by marc at 8:49 PM in Billboard Liberations |
August 25, 2009
Posted by marc at 7:27 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 9, 2009
Posted by marc at 8:02 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 3, 2009
Posted by marc at 7:45 AM in Billboard Liberations |
May 20, 2009
More from Poster Child here.
Posted by marc at 7:59 AM in Billboard Liberations |
April 3, 2009
From Animal:
"In London today, the G20 is in full swing, or rather, riot police are swinging at protesters. Local street artist D*Face took the opportunity to showcase some new work, not on the street but on digital billboards around the city. Several variations of the G20 20 pound note are being displayed with the Queen in varying states of makeup and facelifts, something D*Face has become quite good at...."
More photo's and info on the Animal blog here.
Posted by marc at 7:41 AM in Billboard Liberations |
March 9, 2009
Seen In The Subways Of Manhattan
(Thanks, Scott)
Posted by marc at 8:02 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 2, 2009
Posted by marc at 11:51 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 19, 2009
You can check out Poster Boy's Flickr stream here.
Posted by marc at 8:17 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 12, 2009
A few days ago our friend Just in Berlin spotted these adbusted posters in Berlin.
Posted by marc at 7:44 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 3, 2009
(Thanks, Joe)
Posted by marc at 4:37 PM in Billboard Liberations |
November 30, 2008
(Thanks, Carrie)
Posted by marc at 2:07 PM in Billboard Liberations |
September 12, 2008
Posted by marc at 10:17 PM in Billboard Liberations |
July 16, 2008
To coincide with the German fashion week in Berlin, XOOOOX liberated two advertising billboards in Berlin Mitte.
Posted by marc at 3:57 AM in Billboard Liberations |
May 19, 2008
More from Mantis here.
Posted by marc at 7:30 AM in Billboard Liberations |
May 11, 2008
Posted by marc at 1:11 PM in Billboard Liberations |
April 15, 2008
Posted by marc at 7:36 AM in Billboard Liberations |
April 9, 2008
You can see more work from Faith47 here.
Posted by marc at 7:24 AM in Billboard Liberations |
March 29, 2008
Rececntly BOE (from VIA GRAFIK) and 56K pasted 10 handpainted posters in the streets of Hamburg. You can see the full documentation here.
Posted by marc at 3:08 PM in Billboard Liberations |
December 5, 2007
In Sydney, Australia, the Sutherland local council is running a billboard anti-graffiti
campaign. put up by The "before" and "after" photos are from Sutherland train station.
Before
After
Posted by marc at 7:13 AM in Billboard Liberations |
November 22, 2007
By far one of our favorite billboard hacks in a long time. Ryan, an artist in Seattle used
low-tac adhesive vinyl so that the words could be re-arranged like refrigerator magnets.
He made the "Clear Channel" banner as well to create the full effect.
Posted by marc at 8:49 AM in Billboard Liberations |
October 3, 2007
Still live and taking messages. :)
Posted by marc at 10:07 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 7, 2007
Posted by marc at 6:53 AM in Billboard Liberations |
January 26, 2007
If you logged onto the Wooster site this morning then you may have noticed that we put the "Nike The Ripper" culture jam photograph shown above on the site, and then not too long after we temporarily took it off to respect an email that we received moments after posting it.
Why did we take it down?
Well it was one of those cases where the artist who created the work left it up to everyone else for interpretation. This is the type of work that we like the most, so for us we don't need to always understand what something means.
But this was one of those cases where an email we received prompted us to slow down a bit and ask the artist for some insight into the work. We think that the exchange is an interesting one to share because it shows how leaving things open to interpretation can polarize people.
Here's the email we received this morning:
"Do you know violence against women is wrong?? Why are you supporting this? It's insulting. Patricia"
To which we responded:
"Wow. I didn't see it as that. I had no idea it would have that interpretation. I guess I wasn't thinking about it that way, Let me pose this (a) to the artist and (b) probably to other readers. I will take it down until I get some clarity on it. thanks so much for the email!"
And finally, here was the artists response...
"I (as an artist / socially involved designer / brands- and ads-hater / ad-buster / "de-brander" acting against brands' brutal occupation of everyone's public and mental space) see an invasive and aggressive advertisement put in the streets by an extremely negative multinational corporation showing a woman in a bizarre dancer-move, other people like Patricia just see a "cool" and attention-grabbing picture of a "beautiful" woman, which maybe represents exactly what these people desire to be like: as soon as they see the picture, the picture is more important than the brand which it stands for, just as the branders want it to happen. So Patricia sees a literally hacked woman and not Nike being hacked.
Moreover, this shows us how widely and un-problematically advertising and branding in general are accepted by the western consume-society: Nike doesn't just sell sweatshirts and sneakers (we don't even know if the dancer is wearing Nike). As the detourned ad is showing us, Nike sells images, worlds, values like dynamism, "beauty", strength, a healthy life, etc., just as Mc Donald's sells the American-way-of-life-spirit through its fast-foods and big-macs all over the world! "Let me wear my Air Jordan, let me be Michael Jordan! Who cares if the reality of the corporation isn't that wonderful!" But I think that most of the time it's all about the lack of information about the politics of these giants among the people who buy their stuff.
To say it clear: for me it isn't relevant if on the Nike ad there is a "beautiful" woman, a "beautiful" man or a "beautiful" alien hermaphrodite, hehehe! It is and remains a tactical and violent invasion of my cultural space done by a big multinational company that doesn't care for anything if not for profit. Do you think that Nike cares about the exploitation of the planet? Or about the exploitation of child-labour in Vietnamese sweat-shops? And finally do you think that Nike, or better, it's non-official workshops, care about the conditions of women working for them? Nike could give people at least "human" working conditions, they could contribute to make life easier in those poor countries, they could try to avoid using PVC and use recycled materials in their sneakers. But they don't and never will! And the reason why is that they don't give a shit about mankind (women included) or the planet! Ok, maybe in a few years Nike will launch it's first fair-trade sneaker line; but this only to buy the sympathy of the growing community of socially responsible people. 98% of Nike's income will still be coming from the selling of unsustainable sneakers.
So, Wooster, Patricia and everyone who didn't get the point of this hack, I hope that now you will understand what this is all about and I hope that my work will be published again on Wooster Collective (you can't imagine how happy I was when I got your first mail!).
Cheers
Sputnikk
P.S.: hereby I send you some links to the topic:
http://www.knowmore.org/index.php/Nike%2C_inc.
http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/index.html
http://www.nosweatapparel.com/
http://www.indiaresource.org/
http://www.rprogress.org/
http://www.de-branding.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility"
To which Patricia responds:
Sputnikk,
You state in your note that you are attacking Nike not beautiful woman, but that's not the message you are sending. It's a picture of a woman getting her head cut off.
You state, "for me it isn't relevant if on the Nike ad there is a "beautiful" woman, a "beautiful" man or a "beautiful" alien hermaphrodite, hehehe! " So why not give the oppressed gender,( who gets paid .75 cents to every dollar a man gets, does 90% of household chores, not to mention all the child-raising ) a helping hand and put in it's place a MAN. Isn't that who owns Nike? You ask if Nike cares about exploiting the planet, etc., I guess I'm asking you if you care about the exploitation of woman?
Hope you understand I'm not attacking you personally, just standing up for what I feel is right. As you know, there is a lot wrong in this society and it's up to all of us to participate in an honest debate of exchange.
Patricia
To which Sputnikk responds:
Patricia, I think you still didn't get what my action consists in.
I'll explain to you what exactly happened, step by step:
One day a friend of mine comes to me and shows me a picture of a Nike billboard he saw in Munich on the façade of the NikeWomen shop. My friend tells me: "This is perfect for you": on the billboard there is a woman in a weird dancer-move. She is kinda leaning backwards, her head and hair are hanging and her throat is bare.
So I think: "Wow, if I placed a properly printed and cut-out "swoosh" on the poster over her throat, it would create a very strong effect and the sense of the whole ad would change dramatically! She wouldn't be "cool" anymore, she would look desperate: it would just look like the swoosh is pulling her deeeeeeeeep down." The giant picture was yelling "Hack me, HACK ME, PLEEEASE". So I personally went to the billboard to check it out, I took some measures and went back home to draw the perfect killer-swoosh. 2 nights later me and my friend pasted up the swoosh over the already existing photo.
After the action, watching the Nike billboard, you can't see a "cool" dancer nor the values Nike tries to sell you anymore; instead you can see the personification of Nike (the female dancer) having it's head cut off by its own logo, which now is just as aggressive and dangerous as the politics of the corporation in reality are.
The billboard could have also been showing a male dancer, he would have gotten his head cut off just like the woman had. And that's why I say "for me it isn't relevant if on the Nike ad there is a "beautiful" woman, a "beautiful" man or a "beautiful" alien hermaphrodite".
Did you think it was me who printed the whole billboard, wonderful picture included? Well, if I had the amount of money and the tools you need to create and stick up a billboard like this ("perfect" model, big-format-camera, etc.), then maybe I would create a billboard with the picture of a man having his head cut off by the swoosh, but I would probably create something much different. Anyway … some say that ad-busting simply doesn't work. But pasting something very small, very cheap and very creative that messes up the whole big work done by Nike branders gives me indescribable joy. Computer-hackers use the perfect word "wild pleasure".
I hope that you finally understood what I did. And I love and respect women!
Some readers weigh in:
From Mitch: "both patricia and sputnikk have missed a really important point regarding any anti-ad activity, and that is of course its effect on the public. Not that i would attempt to declare exactly what the public would see in this jammed ad, but i think that the point which hasn't been made is that a subtle (or maybe subtl-er) jam of this nature retains alot of the ad's original qualities. This in turn raises the notion of a jam's authenticity in the eyes of the public - is it an attack, or is it just a new marketing angle? And in this sense i read the outcome of the jam as a clever way of showing how poorly the industry of fashion and advertising actually treats the female body. The distressing issues of violence against women raised by patricia are an effect of how the work achieves this - discomfort about these should really be turned towards the company who produced the ad, and not the artist who exposed a hidden, and darker schematic behind it."
Posted by marc at 2:49 PM in Billboard Liberations |
June 27, 2006
Recently the amazing CutUp Collective, one of the most innovative street art groups in the world, traveled to Barcelona where they attempted a new billboard liberation. The billboard got covered up by a new advertisement within an hour but while it was still wet the collective managed to peel back some of it.
Posted by marc at 8:01 AM in Billboard Liberations |
June 26, 2006
Lifespan: 43 hours
Posted by marc at 8:06 AM in Billboard Liberations |
April 24, 2006
From Mantis:
"This was just begging to be tampered with. Harrods the self proclaimed 'world's most famous department store' situated in the rich West end of London decides to put up a billboard in Hackney Wick, one of the poorest parts of the East end of London with a question for us. I figured I would give them a more local answer."
Posted by marc at 7:32 AM in Billboard Liberations |
February 16, 2006
"This evening at 10:00 pm dr.d hit a billboard bang opposite the Brit awards, the British music industry's annual self-congratulatory love-fest. For all their talk of fair trade, presumably Chris Martin and the other boys in Coldplay do not mind performing at a heavily policed event sponsored by Mastercard from which the people who actually buy their CDs are excluded. They also do not seem to object to having their gigs and records promoted by Clear Channel, a company which now pretty much has a monopoly in the promotion of recordings and the staging of events...."
All the best,
Mother
Posted by marc at 4:14 AM in Billboard Liberations |