BigShinyThing

Video artists Addictive TV were back in town on the weekend, after a marathon session of live Olympic mashups in Europe. Braving the London weather on Friday night, they played to a crowd so enthusiastic that at least one of them had to be dragged half-naked off the roof.

This was Addictive’s third annual outdoor gig at the South Bank, which has become a highlight of the BST summer calendar. This year was even more fun for us, as they invited us along to document the evening photographically. Our photos are up on Flickr.

Spotted in Shoreditch. Niiiice.

An installation of new works by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillips with original works by James Cauty and DFace at the Leonard Street Gallery, E2. Go See.

Many Dalston residents are less than happy about plans for regeneration (or gentrification, depending on your politics and focus) of the Dalston Junction area. Regardless of local opposition, development seems to be powering ahead.

For the past couple of months, the banners and signs of the protesters have been fighting a propaganda war with official posters portraying the brave new world planned by London Transport, Mayors Pipe and Livingston, and a consortium of developers.

The battle for hearts and minds escalated over the Easter break: the blandly cut-and-paste architectural renderings of the happy happy ‘Dalston to be’ riveted to the hoardings at the 38 bus stop on Dalston Lane have accumulated some creative amends at the hands of anti-development activists.

Note the sinister concentration-camp motto over the razor wire penning in the citizens of the gated community: SHOPPING MACHT FREI.

We’ve uploaded more high resolution images on Flickr. As in Hogarth, there is much detail worthy of attention: ASBO-branded shopping bags, anyone?

If you want to visit, go soon before the Powers That Be erase all sign of it. Map here. The site is just across the road from the Dalston Peace Mural — a 1985 celebration of Hackney’s collective anti-nuclear action during the Cold War.

Activists Niko and Andrea place stickers of the “broken link” icon that appears on a web page when the image is missing. We think there’s something enormously sad about it…

A nice follow on from Mr beautiful blank who we wrote about a while back.

Via Wooster Collective.

According to Brandrepublic today, experiential marketing agency CommentUK is launching a campaign for Walkers Crisps involving undercover performers breaking into song in front of surprised passers-by.

The campaign involves singers who appear to be members of the public performing Bobby McFerrin’s a cappella hit ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ in busy areas, before removing their coats to reveal specially designed Walkers t-shirts.

The article goes on to point out that the idea is similar to a failed ITV show It’s Now or Never, where people surprised loved ones with heartfelt messages in the form of a musical.

Justin Foxton, founding partner and chief executive of CommentUK, said:

This is a major initiative that will create a genuine Buzz in nine major cities across the UK. Research has proved that activity such as this has tremendous recall rates and as a way to launch two new crisp varieties it simply can’t be beaten.

Call us cynical, but we think that this latest attempt at generating the dreaded ‘Buzz’ is somewhat flawed. In an age where people are avoiding ads as much as possible and where the slightest marketing infraction can resound online for months, is accosting consumers on the street really the right way to go?

In 1961, a New York City zoning board passed a regulation allowing developers and landlords to build additional rental floor space in exchange for providing public plazas and arcades on privately developed lots. This marked the advent of what has become known as “Privately Owned Public Space” in the city.

Over the last 40 years, “Incentive Zoning” as it is called has been instrumental to the creation of 503 plazas, arcades and other public areas which are concentrated primarily in the midtown area of Manhattan. In return, developers were allowed to build higher and wider structures and they received an estimated 20 million square feet of rental floor area.

When combined, “Privately Owned Public Spaces” have the potential to add an astonishing 824 acres or roughly 50 football fields to the public spaces utilized by New York residents.

This is according to Brendan J. FitzGerald of walkingtoursnyc.com. The site also quotes a three-and-half year study published in 2000 by Harvard Professor Jerold S. Kayden which found that 41% of “Privately Owned Public Spaces” were of “marginal utility” and “inaccessible or devoid of the kinds of amenities that attract public use.”

Taking these stats as a starting point, the Graffiti Research Lab have developed some ‘build your own’ chairs made out of postal boxes in order to reclaim these public spaces. [We note that they passed on using Fedex.]

A video of the chairs in action is viewable on the GRL site and, of course, on their Flickr photopool where you can also fall across lots of other examples of the clever outside-hacking stuff that GRL have done.

ArtNotAds do what they say on the tin — replace outdoor advertising with art. They’ve also utilised Pledgebank to get a campaign going to get enough pledges of £10 to start the campaign by placing a piece or art/poem/etc on one of the Underground station advertising slots.

What the big outdoor media placement companies think of their antics, we shall soon find out…

Via Protein Feed.

Paul Notzold’s lovely app works by:

…using ‘always on’ technology, cell phones with SMS messaging allow an audience to interact with large speech bubbles projected onto a flat surface, like the facade of a building. The bubbles are positioned near windows and doors to encourage an audience to create the conversations happening inside. The audience receives a flyer with the number and simple instructions. A participant sends a text message to the provided phone number and it is then displayed inside the speech bubble. Multiple bubbles may be used and the audience can direct their input to a specific bubble.

Here at BigShinyThing we are constantly amazed by how much kids and artists on the street totally get how to convey the wondrousness of tech and yet the Big Mobile Providers (hello O2 and 3, just for starters) just so patently don’t. Compare and contrast this simple idea for text in public spaces with O2′s current UK marketing effort featuring an animated, travelling bubble…

TXTual link via Wooster Collective.

This is nicely positioned on the side of the White Cube gallery and directly in front of our favourite posh eatery, Cru. It’s one of a pair commissioned from Banksy by Bono for his editorship of The Independent but we like it anyway.

Pictures of the Really Big Elephant parading through London are up on Flickr and a vast improvement on the BBC’s coverage. Featured photo from annie_anywhere’s photostream. Relive the whole story on the Sultan’s Elephant site.

Three years ago, Docteur Gecko found a new way for ‘hacking’ advertising that you find in bus shelters and his modifications can only be seen during the night when the signs become illuminated. Dark.

Via Wooster with thanks to King Adz for the tip.

Says writer Sukhdev Sandhu, who will be exploring the lost London night through a series of journeys over the course of one year. Nighthaunts is a collaboration between Sandhu, audio artist Scanner and website designer Ian Budden and was commissioned by Artangel. Sandhu’s journey is also being serialised in the Daily Telegraph magazine — he happens to be the paper’s chief film critic. As well as visiting sewers, hanging out with night cleaners and flying over the metropolis in police helicoptors, Sandhu is inviting suggestions of places to visit. Not Trade would be ours…

Other abusees have started to plant and submit their own pansies. Discovered via Ms Turquoise Bag in a Tree. There seems to be lots of cool environmental art up North these days.

This month, First Monday journal is focussed on urban screens: the impact of digital presence in public spaces. Much Northern-European cultural studies name-checking, but also a teaser for the Urban Screens 2006 conference (Berlin, October 5-6), which “will elaborate on the discussion and develop the broad spectrum of possible formats and usage of this emerging new media infrastructure.”

And some nice soundbites, for anyone engaged with outdoor:

[...] in taking TV from point-of-sale installations and the captive audiences of station platforms, airports, queues and waiting rooms into ‘public space’ means entering more complex urban environments. It means facing the decline of urban community spaces which, since the 1950s, has often been blamed on television.

Interestingly, next year‘s Urban Screens conference is

currently under preparation in collaboration with BBC Public Space Broadcasting. While Urban Screens 2006 will have ‘brick & mortar’ accents, Urban Screens 2007 will have a distinct focus on the potential of journalistic content: issues surrounding the production and display of media content for Urban Screens, as well as adaptive reuse of ‘old’ content for new media will be explored in detail.

Is there any emergent media that the BBC isn’t exploring?

1. As iPod sales start to slow down, we’re betting on a fierce brand-extension war between Apple and the other online music brands. Competitors have already started to emerge — see MTV’s tie up with Microsoft, Urge.
2. In the same sector, we tip Napster to learn from Google and Yahoo’s mapping successes, and to offer a programming interface (API) for subscribers, so people can build their own software systems using Napster content — expect customised jukeboxes, recommendation systems and music-based games to flourish online. The benefit to Napster? Kudos to the brand which accrue from others’ innovations, a wider audience, and increased advertising opportunities.
3. We’re waiting for a Friday night TV show which features real-time ‘stupid shit’, news and interviews contributed live via 3G mobiles by amateur viewer/reporters out and about around the UK and worldwide — the trash culture flipside of OhMyNews. Expect flash celebrity for a few contributors to follow, and a big spike in phone sales.
4. Still on TV, we expect at least one channel to broadcast experimental blocks of ‘ad-free’ prime time programming to test the waters of post-interruptive-advertising television — probably initially sponsored by a major car brand.
5. Flyposting will be banned in London as Ken sides with the Government on a ‘respect‘ agenda.
6. Sophisticated services offered via Skype will be the surprise eCommerce success story of the year, with third-party developers exploiting the ubiquitous telephony provider’s APIs to provide simple, effective voice access to information, retail and search services in exactly the way that screen-based systems thus far haven’t, for the mobile multitudes.
7. Namecheck BST when territorial disputes over mining rights in polar regions recently exposed by global warning become a major news story, and a source of growing international tension.
8. And a big ‘we told you so’ if Interpol reveals that an unlikely counterfeiting alliance of criminals and ‘just because we could’ hackers has adopted open source development methodologies to make undetectable fakes of a major currency, which subsequently has to be completely withdrawn from circulation, redesigned and reissued.
9. Long odds but not impossible: Sony’s launch of non-Sony-branded hardware or media, in an attempt at a fresh start after the horrors of 2005.
10. We will be saddened but not surprised if a PC virus takes out one of the emergency services for at least a day.
11. 3G. Finally. Yes we’re surprised too.

The ‘Floating Logos’ project says that it ” is inspired by signs perched high atop very tall poles in order for people to view them from a long distance away. Often these poles are so tall that the signs on top of them loom over us, ominously broadcasting their message. The digital elimination of the poles not only illustrates this effect further but also serves to disconnect the signs from the ground and reality. Often the ground is purposefully left out of these images in order to emphasize the disconnect, but hints of terra firma are included in the form of trees, wires, light poles, buildings and other land-based objects.”

Big thanks to Reuben for this.