BigShinyThing

The street art community has reacted to the work as a corporate invasion of their space and retaliated in spectacular style - from daubing ‘fony sony’ across the work to our personal favourite: ‘I don’t want this for Christmas’. Street art site Wooster is cataloguing the various attacks on the PSP graffiti, which Sony paid genuine artists to execute. Meanwhile Wired has stirred up the debate online with a scathing article, sample text:

Advertising firms call it genius, but the word on the street is less flattering.

The Sony ads are the subject of much discussion on Flickr where the artwork can be seen ‘clean’ and street art site Wooster have posted a passionate polemic on the subject.

The mainstream media (in this case the International Herald Tribune) have now picked up on the story, reporting “Sony aims at hip crowd, but bid backfires a bit”. Given that the graffiti story is a mere footnote compared to the far more damaging revelation that some of Sony’s music CDs contain illegal spyware, we would say - no kidding.

Posters placed throughout the city map out a stick figure walking. Click the link to watch.
Via Wooster.

We dispatched our agents to check out the much-hyped Stella McCartney collection at H&M which launched officially today. After fighting their way through London’s most vicious fashionistas, Sarah and Sophie grabbed some ‘looks’ instore on a mobile phone, then beamed them out into BSTflickr photostream. Guerrilla photoshoot? We call it ‘mobeling‘.

With Big Thanks to Sophie and Sarah who came back with narry a scratch.

And it looks like we’re not the only ones … see flickr tag ’stella’.

CutUp have a new exhibition opening on 4th November, at Seventeen - 17 Kingsland Road, E2. They’re clearly not anti-corporate enough to refuse sponsorship for the show from Leffe…

Bigger photos are available on our Flickr photostream.

The copy reads:

MISSING: levels 26-31. Last seen between levels 25 and 30. If you have any information regarding their whereabouts, please contact www.gravestmor.com as the lawyers on level 33+ are growing anxious…

From Gravetsmor, via Bldgblog Blogspot.

Tampering with the sides of trains might not be too popular in the current climate but it’s a lovely idea all the same.

The project’s creators at Berlin University say:

Affordable mobile video projections will offer a vast range of different forms of use and abuse of this technology soon. While this will certainly be of great interest to the advertising industry it could also extend the idea of re-conquest of public space often only reduced to graffiti and streetart. Our contribution to this is the idea of a parasite. Parasite is an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Using the speed of the train as parameter for the projected content, the projection starts with the train moving inside a tunnel.

The tunnels of a subway-system bear something mystic—most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Confusing the routine of your train-travelling-journey, your habits and perception Parallel Worlds—making use of Parasite—allows you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery.

Gridskipper has the video.

Found on the we-make-money-not-art blog which is rapidly becoming the definitive source of People Doing Weird Stuff with Tech.

In April of this year, arts collective Heavy Trash deposited three bright orange viewing platforms in front of three Los Angeles gated communities: Brentwood Circle, Park La Brea and Laughlin Park. The platforms are intended to draw attention to the growing phenomenon of gated communities where the Haves can lock themselves away from the Have-Nots in our society. According to Setha Low, a professor at the City University of New York, there are now more than 1 million homes behind such walls in the greater Los Angeles area alone.

Heavy Trash intend the platforms to call attention to the walls of gated communities and provide visual access to parts of the city that have been cut off from public use. They also profer a replacement solution for the fear and loathing in society. According to their blog, Heavy Trash advocates:

Unrestricted pedestrian access. Since it is difficult to commit a property crime in Los Angeles without a car, unrestricted pedestrian access could be provided to all gated communities. This would return the parks, streets and sidewalks that have been removed from the public realm back to the residents of Los Angeles.

Investment in public infrastructure. Encourage investment in public infrastructure — like parks, streets, sidewalks and schools — by restoring local control over property tax revenues, essentially fixing the unintended consequences of Proposition 13.

“More eyes on the street.” Amend zoning code to encourage more mixed-use residential neighborhoods with 24-hour activity. Legalize second units (”Granny Flats”) in single-family homes. Both of these actions would put more people outside during the normal course of a day, and nothing works quite as well to make neighborhoods safer, friendlier and livelier.

Gated communities and other examples of the rich barracading themselves off from society are hardly a new phenomenon. As Mike Davis wrote in the seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles back in 1990,

The dire predictions of Richard Nixon’s 1969 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence have been tragically fulfilled: we live in ‘fortress cities’, brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor … The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes as zero-sum game. In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort.

For me, Davis’s dystopian vision of a city that repels its poor is typified in the ‘bum proof bench’ - a bench that it is impossible to sleep on without rolling off.

See also previous posts:

• Popular culture bites back: street artists attack ad agency ‘graffiti’.
• Hackney resists gentrification

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Manchester based artist Hilary Jack has set up a website of images of plastic bags caught in trees. As the project developed, she started to stick her own bags in trees with little signs as well as inviting people to submit photos. She writes on the site:

Two winters ago I noticed an unmarked turquoise carrier bag trapped in a leafless tree in a city centre street, startling and vibrant against an otherwise colourless, urban, winter landscape. The image stuck with me, and I decided to make it into a public work of art.

As well as demonstrating the peculiar madnesses that the net seems to bring out in people, the project is also socially minded. Jack adds, “Urban trees and shrubbery planted at the whim of an architect or urban planner become a magnet for detritus, turquoise bags being the most visible. As a reminder of our consumer culture the bags hang there, taking years to decay, and acting as an absurd memorial to our excesses.”

Maybe she should include that lovely scene from the 1999 film American Beauty, the video footage of a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

‘Guerrilla drive in’ groups post screening times on the internet, but most attendees are just people driving by. Sound is transmitted by the cars tuning their radios to the correct FM frequency.

Lawrence Bridges, screens his comedy 12 in parking lots, and calls it a ‘gift and tribute’ to Los Angeles. Kate McCabe of rad.art projects movies onto the back of movie houses to ‘offer an alternative to surrounding corporate control of media’. Pilot, a collective in Chicago, lights up a warehouse wall with videos of friends debating politics to ‘trespass the corporate control of media’, and possibly bore the pants off everyone watching.

Wes Modes of the Santa Cruz, California, Guerrilla Drive-in has a more simplistic take: “We said, ‘Why aren’t there free movies? There’s all these walls!’”

Courtesy of Black Book.

Photo courtesy of Ektopia.

Ad agency apes street art by stencilling ads around ‘hot’ areas in London like Old Street to promote a Brazilian liquor.

Street artists notice — mainly due to posts of the ‘graffiti’ on street art sites like Wooster Collective and blogs like The Londonist). A BBC2 documentary, ‘Inside Saatchi and Saatchi’, which showed the making of the campaign might have alerted them too…

Street artists expose agency’s lame attempt at nicking their look and paint over/paper over the images. Gain coverage in The Times.

Read and learn:

‘Saatchi Tags London with Fake Art to Hawk Brazilian Liquor’

There’s a lovely irony in graffiti artists ‘tidying up’ advertising by papering over it. Or by crossing it out (see picture). The Saatchi’s image is also exposed by the fact that it doesn’t actually say anything — it’s just a stylised picture of the Christ. Compare it to, say, street art by Banksy which always expresses something — more often than not deeply political.

Time magazine are trying to pull a similiar stunt in New York at the moment, watched with increasing amusement by Gawker.

The smallprint reads

“Dear reader: our circulation director wants us to try what she’s calling a ‘grassroots marketing campaign.’ Here’s what you need to do. Make some photocopies of this page. Cut slits between the tabs at the bottom. Then, display or distribute the poster in places like corner stores, bathroom stalls, laundromats, beauty parlors, university libraries, stuffed in other magazines, bookstores, health clubs, supermarkets, community stores, phone booths, subway cars, windshields, lunch rooms, video arcades, and telephone poles.”

So go on then…

In this case, a derelict station master’s house off Brick Lane is transformed with a lick of paint and a huge blue rabbit. The same lovely building has recently turned up the Babyshambles video ‘Fuck Forever’.

Los Angeles-based Forkscrew Graphics appropriate the iPod ad campaign to produce a series of posters entitled ‘iRaq’. These replace the silhouettes of youths dancing with the also familiar/iconic silhouettes of Iraqi prisoners being tortured.

See more here

Situationist graphic design collective CutUp feature in this week’s Design Week:

…CutUp, a group led by ‘J’, a recent graduate in graphic design from Camberwell College of Arts. Critical of the way advertising has come to dominate our visual space, this collective of four is attempting to disrupt and raise awareness of the ‘colonisation of public space’ by reconfiguring billboards.

By stealth of night, members of the group cut up large-scale outdoor posters, out of which they then create a new image, which they hope will give the public pause for thought about the nature of the images that are being imposed upon them.

CutUp searches hoardings, carefully selected for tonal values, a quiet location and low positioning, and then carefully removes the posters. These are then cut up into a patchwork of little squares, numbered and scanned into a computer. The squares are reworked into a new image, which is then secretly and painstakingly replaced on another billboard.

Of course, slicing up and reordering expensive advertising is illegal, and CutUp could face prosecution for criminal damage. The group is currently working on a series of four ‘reordered’ billboards in London’s Shoreditch, to co-incide with an exhibition of its work at the Kemistry Gallery.

CutUp’s first piece, in 2003, was a reordering of a Nicorette billboard, transformed by collage to show the haunting, shy smile of murdered child Damilola Taylor. ‘It is the power of the billboard rather than the brand that we are trying subvert,’ says ‘J’.

Cut Up Show runs from 5 April to 30 April at Kemistry Gallery, 43 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London EC2A