Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment.

People from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures come together at the festival to re-imagine the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an opportunity for civic engagement. The Village Voice describes Conflux as a “network of maverick artists and unorthodox urban investigators… making fresh, if underground, contributions to pedestrian life in New York City, and upping the ante on today’s fight for the soul of high-density metropolises.”

From architects to skateboarders, Conflux participants have an enthusiasm for the city that’s contagious. Over the course of the long weekend the sidewalks are literally transformed into a mobile laboratory for creative action. With tools ranging from traditional paper maps to high-tech mobile devices, artists present walking tours, public installations and interactive performance, as well as bike and subway expeditions, workshops, a lecture series, a film program and live music performances at night.

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I remember seeing KAWS work in San Francisco when I was temping in downtown office buildings. It was a black and white ad for something in a Market Street kiosk and there was a green, multi headed snake attacking the model in the photo. I remember studying it trying to figure out if it was an actual campaign or if someone had broken into it. And if they had, why would they do that? For me this was pre-internet, pre-art education, pre-public work. I was a 21 (?) year old college and high school drop out with a shitty office job and half an eye open. And this work was one of the many, many, many, many, many, many things that came out of the Bay Area that expanded my idea of what was possible in the world.

via Wooster

Market Street Kiosks.
Background: Three sided containing four by six foot poster advertisements. Introduced to San Francisco on the condition that one of the three sides is used for art – handled by the San Francisco Art Commission. Interestingly, advertisers are only interested in the 2 sides that face car traffic.
Cost: between $1367 and $1473 per panel. But with a 16 panel minimum cost ranges from $21,866 to $23,562. This does not include production which could easily be thousands more.

Wildposting
Background: While seen pasted all over San Francisco’s construction sites, these two by three foot posters are displayed without permits and are illegal. Regardless of the law, the less scrupulous can still pay to have them made and pasted up. Because one hires a contractor, it’s possible to argue plausible deniability if one ever were caught. But most likely that wont happen because the law is so poorly enforced. (Conversely, throw up some graffiti on a wall and see what happens…)
Cost: For a week of wildposting you can get 40-60 posters. Cost (including production) is about $4,250.

Other Factors: Campaign design, testing, and evaluation costs not included. Advertising expenses are tax deductible.

Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald’s gently drifting over Los Angeles.

A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has come up with a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos - Flogos, as he calls them.

Francisco Guerra, who’s also a former magician, developed a machine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.

The Walt Disney Co. will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Guerra said.

“It’s a shock factor when you look up and there’s a logo over your head,” said Guerra, whose company, SnowMasters Inc., makes machines that churn out fake snow and foam for Hollywood movies and special events.

A single Flogo can travel as far as 30 miles and as high as 20,000 feet, Guerra says, and a machine can produce one every 15 seconds. Guerra says he could put a half-dozen machines together and fill the sky with almost any shape a company orders.

Imagine a line of drifting Flogos shaped like the Honda logo leading to a car dealership and you get the idea.

You can find out more about this company and how these things work here.

So can anything be done about floating bubble billboards? From the article I quoted above, it looks like the F.A.A. might try to regulate them as some sort of an air hazard. Otherwise, I doubt any municipality has any laws against such a thing on the books. I guess this image might be something to watch out for if this catches on…

Update: here’s a video we found on youtube (which doesn’t seem top-secret)

I’ll plan to update these regularly, but for now, here are just a few of the comments that have come across my desk at the AAAFFF since taking over the ED position:

“I have worked for the past 4 years (since I graduated from a very prestigious culinary school) doing R&D for a food manufacturer . . . Boy, throwing away 5,000 pre-packaged hamburger buns when they don’t get used is even more egregious when you wake up to CNN telling you that people are rioting in Haiti and Egypt because they can’t afford a loaf of bread. Poor people are so silly. I’m all ready to quit my job so that I can devote my time to the theatre which is my true love . . .” .” —Midwestern Ad Man

“Today, after my job, I was walking to my apartment and felt sad, because, after a good weekend, my work today was a #%$# (censured). It’s not life to live, 10 hours and only business, business. Some people want to sell agriculture machines and technology and I spend my time on it?” —Brasilia Ad Man

“Throughout my studies I’ve found myself questioning if advertising is the right industry for me. I’m in love with the creative process, but not as interested in the products it’s being centered around.”—New York Ad Woman

“[The AAAFFF is] enough to make me wish I could leave advertising all over again. . . . I left advertising, but I never got a GIANT NOVELTY CHECK! I didn’t even get a normal-sized severance package. I guess I did get a pretty nice unemployment income for a while. Advertising is inherently evil, though, I am glad I am not doing that anymore. It is better to starve righteously.” —Minneapolis Painter

“We’ve seen your website at http://antiadvertisingagency.com/projects/foundation-for-freedom and we love it! We see that your traffic rank is 602777 and your link popularity is 26. Also, you have been online since 19/06/2004. With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website. If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: [website deleted for privacy concerns].” — Internet Ad Man

Approximately two weeks after we reported on TuneBoom Pro, a tool apparently used by major labels and indie artists to artificially inflate the number of times their songs had been streamed on MySpace, the site has gone offline. We had contacted MySpace about TuneBoom Pro, but it’s unclear whether MySpace had anything to do with the site’s disappearance.

One way or another, the site is offline. However, bands and labels looking for a way to fake MySpace popularity have plenty of other ways to manipulate their play counts on MySpace Music. A reader recently sent in a list of 46 alternatives to the possibly defunct TuneBoom Pro service.

Is it wrong to inflate MySpace song plays? If every other band and label is doing it, you almost have to — just like baseball players and steroids. It’s unlikely that MySpace will be able to defeat every type of play count-increasing technology, just like it’s unlikely that Major League Baseball will ever be able to do away completely with all performance-enhancing drugs.

Read the rest… MySpace Play Count Inflaters: The Steroids of the Music Industry | Listening Post from Wired.com

This five minute excerpt has ads, but you can get the whole DVD - with no ads - as a torrent - start here.

Not sure? Here’s a well written review of the movie from Kevin Flanagan of the P2P Foundation:

My computer finished downloading the Graffiti Research Lab Movie Sunday morning. I stuck it on for a quick look and ended up watching the whole thing. The film is a testament to the cultural value of the hacker ethic and a free and open source approach in cultural production. GRL are an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication. After quiting their ‘proper jobs’ Evan Roth and James Powderly founded The Graffiti Research Lab while working together at the Eyebeam OpenLab.

Eyebeam Mission Statement
“Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.”

The Graffiti Research Lab approach the idea of graffiti in its widest sense. To give an example they make a really nice analogy in the film between street artists and hackers. “Hackers treat software the way street artists treat the city, they look for these systems they identify them then flip them a little bit to tell something that the city didn’t intend to tell”. Disrupting the flows of everyday life through creative and playful intervention, without seeeking permission.

In the spirit of openess the GRL publish the instructions and source code for their projects on the GRL website. The site lists many projects, some of the better known being ‘Throwies’ and ‘Laser Tagging’.
GRL invented ‘throwies’ a simple combination of an l.e.d with a battery and a magnet, colourful little lights that can be thrown in large amounts onto metal surfaces in public spaces, they can also be used to make images or text.

GRL also developed the amazing laser tagging system which allows for street artists to write or draw straight over the entire surface of a large building using a laser and a projector.

Publishing, sharing the know how to these projects online, putting it in peoples hands the projects and ideas take on and evolve a life of their own. This is one of the greatest things about the free and open source approach. However there is a flip side to this, which has been discussed on this blog before, that is the problem of the appropriation of commons based production by commercial interest. In the movie GRL discuss how big business has appropriated their projects for advertising and commercial purposes. Marketing strategists deperately looking for novel and fashoinable trends to associate their products with, paid to tune into whats happening on the ’street’ twist what begin as antagonisitc counter cultural strategies to serve commercial interests. As soon as anything goes public it becomes vulnerable to appropriation and exploitation. Its perfectly legal for corporations to take innovations from the commons and alter it to suit their interests, but the opposite is true for the public for whom remixing innovation from the IP regulated domain of the corporations is illegal. This is not a two way conversation. Public space is contested space which in actuality is not public at all, but commercial space regulated on behalf of commercial interests. This needs to be challenged. GRL responds to this with further counter strategies and have declared a war for open urban space, on the logic that if street art and graffiti are illegal then advertising which appropriates the aesthetics of these art forms should be made illegal too.

Creative subversion of the status quo and the magical transformation of the everyday must go on.

To download the film and find out more about the GRL check out http://graffitiresearchlab.com/

CHICAGO—Only 2 weeks after the Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation For Freedom announced its new giving campaign, donations have come in from all over the country, raising the pot offered to one lucky creative to $670—and she or he will still receive a giant check!

The 2008 Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation For Freedom Award (AAAFFFA), designed to oust advertising, marketing, and PR creatives from their careers, received a healthy boost from young artists, activists, and everyday people in New York, Chicago, and Columbus, Ohio eager to help the organization in the mission to decrease commercialization of public space, human relationships, journalism and art by removing a single individual from an industry that directly supports these goals.

“We call it ‘reverse robin-hooding’,” AAAFFF Executive Director Anne Elizabeth Moore explains. “We’re not stealing, we’re asking. Also, in a way, I guess we’re giving to the rich instead of the poor. But we’re doing it for the right reasons.”

Steve Lambert, CEO of the AAA, agrees. “This display of generosity is just the first step. More valuable than the money we’re giving one marketing professional is the donation they’re giving us; by leaving advertising and working for the common good.” The AAAFFF also accepts non-financial donations.

College students have been moved to donate by the AAAFFF’s accepting applications from fellow students changing majors from advertising, marketing, or public relation to social services, art, journalism, creative writing or similar endeavors. “This award can make a substantial difference for a college student,” Moore explains, “helping to pay for additional classes to complete a new major and the extra text books required. We’re here to make a real difference.”

An upcoming “testimonials” section of the AAA site will help inform students who currently believe marketing is a glamorous world of cash and creativity and provide them with gritty, real-life stories from jaded professionals in the industry.

“We thought advertisers themselves would be all over this. It’s the perfect way to oust a hated adversary and better the chances of total ad-world domination,” Lambert states. “Who knew regular people hated advertising this much?”

Application forms are available now at the Anti-Advertising Agency’s website, and must be typed and postmarked September 1, 2008. Students are urged to plan ahead, and prepare their paperwork over the summer.

# # #

The mission of the Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation For Freedom is to bring the best and brightest former ad pros together once a year; inspire young people to leave the craft; focus the industry and public at large on the profoundly negative social justice impacts of advertising; inspire problem-solving methods focused on the most important issues facing the real world; and shine a light on the influence the advertising, media, and marketing industries has on dwindling public space, atrophying human relationships, and the destruction of democracy.

Donate to AAAFFF online via PayPal. Please be sure to specify “Anti-Advertising Agency” as the item. Thanks!

The Anti-Advertising Agency is fiscally sponsored by The Lab. The Lab is a project of The Art Re Grup, Inc., a non-profit organization operating within the meaning of section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions and in-kind donations are fully tax-deductible within the parameters established by current tax law.

]]> http://antiadvertisingagency.com/projects/aaafff-up-35-in-first-2-weeks/feed http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/anarchy-the-videogame http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/anarchy-the-videogame#comments Fri, 02 May 2008 17:54:48 +0000 Anne Elizabeth Moore http://antiadvertisingagency.com/?p=520

I know I said that posting would be sparse if at all while I was doing my residency at AS220 but, you know, this picture from a park in Barcelona came across my virtual desk courtesy the brilliant Matt Malooly in Chicago and I had to share its deeply conflictual messages with you. As you gaze upon it, you may enjoy pondering the questions: Who created this? What are they trying to say? How well were they paid? And is it extra awesome or just fucked up that, clearly, none of those dudes are anarchists?

My argument is old, but bears repeating here: that if this is your mode of activism, you need a new mode, and if this your mode of marketing, then please cut it out. But this image offers so few clues as to what is being said, it’s almost nothing but a funny brand mention of the kind I discuss extensively in Unmarketable. See the original here, with the Spanish version of the caption, “the motto of the new generation?”

]]> http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/anarchy-the-videogame/feed http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/billboard-all-religions-are-fairy-tales http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/billboard-all-religions-are-fairy-tales#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 14:00:29 +0000 Steve Lambert http://antiadvertisingagency.com/?p=519 Found in the bottom of my inbox; this story from WFTV in Florida. Read all the way through to see my favorite part…

Business Owners, Customers Upset Over Controversial Billboard

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — It looked harmless enough, but the words on a billboard unnerved so many people that a popular restaurant nearby actually lost business. The billboard was on Colonial Drive near Old Cheney Highway.

Although the popular Straub’s Seafood restaurant often advertises on it, it wasn’t their billboard. The sign was taken down after Channel 9 started asking questions.

The billboard came down around 4:00 Friday afternoon and nearby business owners are relieved. Straub’s Restaurant can replace the sign with the night’s specials.

At first glance, the sign looked like a children’s cartoon, but the message next to the fairy princess stirred emotions.

“When you condemn all religions and say they are a fairytale, that is wrong,” said Rich Stormes, a nearby business owner. The billboard went up a week before Easter and business at the restaurant went down.

“Easter Sunday is usually a busy good day,” said John Russel, an employee at Straub’s. “Easter Sunday business was down by two-thirds.”

Since the sign is so close, John Russel’s customers thought the restaurant paid for the billboard. To clear any confusion up, Russel put up a sign of his own and called MediaNet, the company who owns the billboard.

“It’s been causing us some problems. I think it’s causing a bit of controversy city-wide. People have been contacting the media,” Russel added.

MediaNet said it had no idea the sign was there and someone put it up illegally in the middle of the night. (my emphasis -SL) Nearby business owners said they weren’t buying it.

“They should have known what was going up on the billboard. He should proof it. He had to proof it,” Stormes stated.

The billboard rents for $1,400 a month. If an anti-religious group paid to rent it legitimately, there is no telling how long it would have been up.

Orange County does not regulate messages on billboards. They are protected by free speech. (If you can get the corporation who owns the billboard to post your content -SL)

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