Our pals at San Francisco’s Billboard Liberation Front, feeling the heat after their recent ATT/NSA campaign, “decided to temporarily relocate to safehouses on the European continent.” While hiding out they spoke at The Game is Up! in Ghent Belgium and distributed one of their many valuable texts.
The new PDF of their The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement is free to download now.
To whet your appetite for more knowledge, I’ll post the introduction below:
Look up!
Billboards have become as ubiquitous as human suffering, as difficult to ignore as a beggar’s outstretched fist. Every time you leave your couch or cubicle, momentarily severing the electronic umbilicus, you enter the realm of their impressions. Larger than life, subtle as war, they assault your senses with a complex coda of commercial instructions, the messenger RNA of capitalism. Every time you get in a car, or ride a bus, or witness a sporting event, you receive their instructions. You can’t run and you can’t hide, because your getaway route is lined to the horizon with signs, and your hidey-hole has a panoramic view of an 8-sheet poster panel.
There are a million stories in the Big City, and as many reasons to want to hack a billboard. We have our reasons, and we don’t presume to judge yours. In this manual, we have made a conscious effort to steer clear of ideology and stick to methodology. The procedures outlined here are based on our 20+ years’ experience executing billboard improvements professionally, safely, and (knock wood) without injury or arrest. In most cases, is should not be necessary to follow the elaborate, even obsessive precautions we outline here. A can of spray paint, a blithe spirit, and a balmy night are all you really need.
Blank DeCoverly
BLF Minister of Propaganda
