This is the coolest project I’ve read about in weeks. Basically, people painted over existing commercial billboards, often replacing them with art.

From their about page, emphasis mine:

First and foremost the NYSAT projects targeted a single company called NPA City Outdoor, otherwise known as Contest Promotions. Here at PublicAdCampaign we oppose all outdoor advertising in public spaces, legal and illegal, as it alters the physical and psychological landscape of our shared environment for the worse, treating us as self interested consumers. The choice to target NPA was made for two reasons and was not the result of personal issues with the company. The first is that NPA happens to operate completely illegally in NYC making it a prime target to challenge outdoor advertising’s use of our public environment. This also made it more likely that people would be willing to whitewash approximately 20,000 square feet, or 120 illegal street level billboards, given that they were illegal in the first place. The second reason is simply that all NPA street level billboards can be reached from the sidewalk and are therefor accessible enough to even consider for a project of this scale.

NPA City Outdoor operates over 500 illegal street level billboards in the 5 boroughs of NYC. Despite this the city has been either unable or unwilling to deal with this problem directly. As engaged citizens the participants in this project have taken it upon themselves to remedy this problem. In doing so they have realized their potential as public citizens by taking it upon themselves to create an environment that is a direct result of their actions.

In an effort to illuminate the illegal advertising issue in New York, over 100 participants from as far as Toronto and France, took it upon themselves to reclaim these spaces for public communications and realize their potential as public citizens concerned for our shared public environment. In an action coordinated by PublicAdCampaign, participants eliminated the illegal content by whitewashing over all the NPA ad locations below 23rd street, then returning to the newly liberated locations to create public works of art and commentary.

The first non violent civil disobedience project happened on April 25th 2009, and resulted in the whitewashing of over 120 illegal ads and the creation of countless public works. There were 4 arrests in the first action. The second project on October 25th whitewashed 116 illegal billboards and was poised to release over 114 public artworks on the city when NPA responded by reposting their illegal content and patrolling the streets for our participants. The second project resulted in the arrest of 5 individuals. All of the arrested have had their cases dismissed and locked because NPA failed to sign the depositions, preferring to sweep the controversy under the rug as quickly as possible.

If I could just repeat myself a little bit:

Public spaces are public property. We all modify our environment by living in it. The sounds and smells and rhythms of the neighborhood are an organic reflection of its occupants. Putting up posters is just like trimming the hedges or mowing the lawn.

…It really actually irritates me quite a bit that commercial messages are seen as more legitimate uses of public space than artistic expression. I cannot just put my art up on the side of a building and expect it to remain. But if I were to post a commercial of some sort, people see it as normal and nobody even blinks.

When I go on an adventure wearing my safari hat / fake moustache outfit, the most common question I get asked is “Who are you working for?” The assumption is that we are all self-interested consumers, and that our actions are more or less directed by capitalism. When you start doing things that do not revolve around the exchange of money, a lot of people have trouble orienting onto it. Many are not used to thinking in non-commercial terms. They are used to having conversations where the subtext is money – what they did to earn it, how they spent it, why they need it… They tend to think of entertainment in terms of products or services — something to be consumed, not a playful interactive process. Their vocabulary of Fun has atrophied.
When I see something that clearly comes from outside of capitalism, I find it incredibly refreshing. It’s a signal that you don’t have to keep running around like a stressed out cash monkey. If you’re poor, you can orient yourself onto different rewards than money – and this can INSTANTLY transform your entire reality tunnel. Suddenly you’re not on the bottom rung anymore, you’re one of the only people on this sad rock who’s enjoying the ride.

They’re public domain if you want them.

I was going to do a whole set, but I wasn’t happy with Mal1 and Syadasti hinted that it would be too much frustration with too little reward so I didn’t bother finishing it. Gulik is okay, though.

I’m now going in a completely different direction with the project. Hopefully, it’ll work.

Ask me five questions. I’ll answer anything!

I heard they aren’t even allowed labor unions; I mean, who are they going to blame when management closes the oil wells?

Foreign policy, gay marriage, telling progressives to “make me care”, the health care debacle where they kept rewriting it to please the Con. The complete lack of change. The dismissive attitude towards hope. Seriously, the more I see of Obama, the more I wonder whether he’s just our old friend George in for a third term.

Mark Twain was right. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.

I’ll go one step further: If the president had any power, they wouldn’t let a black man get elected. So, the good news is: it’s not the black man’s fault. The bad news is: they’ll blame him for it anyway.

I am slowly becoming as cynical as the Troll Discordians. This upsets me because I don’t like hating. Please, I beg of you all, how do I not become a victim of society’s complete and total fuckedupness? And, for once, locking myself in my room, curling into a ball, and writing erotic fiction about teddy bears is not the answer.

Abortion is [...] not to be used as a constant easy-out card for women who do not want to take responsibility for a child.

Does consent to swimming imply consent to drowning? (Does consent to sex imply consent to pregnancy?)

The common reply involves knowing and accepting the risks, which we can all agree with.

But what if we do accept the risk? What if we learn to swim and wear our water wings? What if our wings burst and we get a lung-full of water and panic and go under? At what point does it stop being acceptable to stand by and say, “It’s your fault; I won’t help you.”

The answer is: it’s never okay to stand by and let others suffer. That’s hurtful, and hurting people is bad. Instead, even if we can’t swim, we should call someone who can, look for flotation devices that we can throw to them, etc. Helping people is good.

So, even if they are being completely irresponsible and end up with an unwanted pregnancy, it’s not okay for us to abandon them.

My desire to make them take responsibility is trumped by my moral obligation to help them in any way I can.

Let’s have at it: A Discordian Advanced Debate and Apologetics Golden Something or Other (DADAGASM (Am I doing it right?)). The topic this thread: abortion. On Demand or Satellite? Without Apology or Fries With That?

(This post would have been slightly almost-funnier had I found a way to link directly to the rings. Thou shalt scroll down.)

(x-post from cramul.us)

These labels transform nearly any physical object into your very own facebook wall! People are DYING to know what you like or don’t like. These stickers will help you broadcast your opinion all over the freaking place.

This page is designed to be printed on Avery 5160 address label paper. If you don’t have any label paper, you could just cut them out and tape them places.

This idea is called LIKEGASM, and it is a part of project POSTERGASM. We like to make weird, funny, surreal modifications to day to day life, slowly transforming the world into the place we want to live.

If you take any pictures of these stickers in action, please upload them to flickr.com and tag them “LikeGASM“.

Printable Facebook “Like” Stickers

DOING is the key word here. The opportunities for passive entertainment are endless. TV, radio, Internet, DVD, Xbox. The real worry is when the passivity of sit-down, play along becomes an imitation of action. If we want to save the dolphins, we just make a group on Facebook, then try to make a chain mail to get a billion signatures to the Japanese Prime Minister, xpost to LJ, make a note on Twitter and use our inbuilt webcam to make a video of ourselves talking about how terrible it all is. This is the world of Slacktavism, of armchair activism. You can meet people online, chat, make money, order food. It all has the appearance of doing stuff – but it’s not.

It’s for this reason that prominent Discordian, Professor Cramulus’s term Activitist struck a chord.

An Activitist (not to be confused with an activist) is an active proponent of activities. Activitism is the opposite of being passively entertained. An activitist seeks to engage his or her environment as opposed to merely being a consumer, an observer, a member of the audience.

In a sense (in a kind of Jungs theory of opposites kind of way) it politicizes the very act of doing. The search for active entertainment, as opposed to passivity is transformed from some thing people do to a communal identity.

A group who largely embodied this spirit, though are now defunct, were the San Francisco Suicide Club, a prelude to the Cacophony Society and the Billboard Liberation Front, with members involved in the birth of Burning Man. This group held a number of events, based on gaining new experiences. From their site;

Events generally fall into three categories: Adventures, infiltrations, and stunts. As you may notice… no WHY or PHILIOSOPHY is attached…

No why or philosophy is attached… It’s not that there was no thought or reason or philosophy at all. There’s a generally explicit intention, but all of the why, the pondering, the musing and discussion comes after the fact. Before that, it’s all action.

1. Work-Safety First
2. High Weirdness by Male (title courtesy of Ratatosk)
3. Fortean Phenomena
4. Broken Images
5. Fnord

And about the holidays.

Let me know what you think.

Updated: Second drafts, now with red Gregorian weekends.

Updated: Third drafts, now with differently red Gregorian weekends, and more holidays. The About page has also been updated.

sound: Sisters of Mercy – This Corrosion

Hey now hey now. Nothing begins like that, no song no nothing. Not a poem that is *known* or a book or a play or a movie but hey now now. The cities grow smaller with each and every passing day as they grow larger and more people come to the city, it’s always the same people that will settle for what everyone else is so as its form expands, its spirit diminishes. Where did we leave off when we forgot how to sing and dance, what happened to the diary we used to have but have no more, where did it disappear into nothingness, this us. When did you stop listening to what you did before you were 23 and what did you listen to, what do you listen to now? Can you watch inside your mind an argument with your parent and can you understand the parent?

It was apparent that we shouldn’t turn out like them but it makes sense now, what they did. What they’ll do but there is more clarity there, connected, as I am in your eyes, there where you sit and twinkles flow through you, generated by your eyes and your story is being told with a backdrop from the dark eighties. We hear unwashed kids sing about their souls as we caress each others and time is there with us, there is no suspension but rather a sensation of living through this moment with you, china skin and short hair, pudgy but thin and smart but stupid. You could have gone places kid and there are better places to go than here but we’re here now and we feel the wine and the weed wrapped through it, permeating from every pore of creation.

When we grow old, our sons and daughters are beyond our command. I don’t know about discordianism as a religion but I see it as a proper guide to help children evolve. Lightly teached with no zealotry in hand, like what it is, a dumb joke inside the funniest set of the dullest comedian. A white elephant watching itself in the mirror, amazed. Chaos never really goes away and order only has certain places where it works. I wish I knew that. I wish I knew more about the mechanics and functions of this world than what I learned of our utopia, our history, religion and politic. I saw then where we wanted to go while I would have loved to just see it the way it is, the way the beast works, mechanical machinations functioning steadily to this tug of war system.

When we die we will not be able to intellectually explain the experiences or the experience of dying, knowingly but we will smile or frown and we will know. Before we let anyone else do it, we’ll judge it ourselves. With the perspective of death, we will see it clearly and we will know everything, every black and white rock of this dualistic world, this fallen void where we walk and preach and as we die we will know how we performed, we will know if we were an asset to the company and we will know who we were and who we are and we will see the ending and none will ever know before they do. Paranoia breeds science and we are in a world of science now, everything is being analyzed, perhaps latest of all, the very food we eat. There’s a movie called eat drink man woman and it’s worth watching. It’s a film basically made for chefs but chefs are usually too stupid to understand or have any interest in anything that requires you to think, at least when it’s spoken in an asian language.

But if you made an english movie about it and slapped some hot young models in it you’d have everyone wanting to see it and there would be lines like grains of sand in the desert because that’s where we are as we drink cactus and bathe in mother earth. We’re here, where the basics of the movie are. There’s food, drink, men, women. The necessities of life are all gathered here and when you think about it it would make a nice new type of reality, that wanted the positive and not the negative. They say that sex sells and they’re right but that’s because it’s become a need, a perfect face gazing towards the abyss of us human waste, something radiating through the night, a piercing light as we grab for the gossips when we’re at the dentist and the doctor and every waiting room we spend our miserable time in, trying to find the light

The eighties did so much right in its own wrong but it takes time to find it, it takes weeks or years to delve into this, here a heart of an era, here it is but it is there, we can still grasp it and understand a decade of decisions if we ever wanted but the pentagon is a pentagon so it can hold cthulhu because the pentagon is built on the sunken city of r’lyeh and it used to be an old indian pentagon there before they arrived and some of those who knew thought about releasing it when it was possible but it didn’t work, there were no dodos and no guy fawkeseseses because they were all dead, all extinct, we were in a newer, braver world and we cast our idols as we bled for it, watching conspiracy theories with jesse ventura.

REMEMBER LEST WE FORGET AND REPEAT OUR MISTAKES is written in the elevator towards hell while in the one ascending there is SAVE YOUR BRIGHTEST SMILE FOR HELL and these are our choices. These are the dreams we correspond with, the choices we make every day as we build or burn karma shopping for groceries, preparing ourselves for hell as we buy the store brand for everything even a quarter of foie gras. This is actually condemnable to hell and we know it as we open a store brand beer before we glide out of there, thirsty and hungry, sweaty but sobering up. We did all the drugs and now we resort to what we can get at nine in the morning and we praise jesus it’s not sunday as we sit in the park like people freshly out of a cave or vault 13.

It flows and it ebbs, the river. We’ve been watching it for days now and we sit here, each and everyone with us collecting inspiration from the environment and everyone else, an acid dream coming through over two weeks as something new is born, a concept that encompasses all parts and thoughts of life, a package for everything for you in your life as we sat there and watched the river flow and ebb and we dreamt it at our stations and we saw it from within, it was only us there and the river, nothing caught in a twilight darkness, we were gray tainted men, tainted by civilization we appreciated nature in a professional sense, each with our profession and we changed.

You know what it begins with? Choir. A violent airy choir before technology kicks in and takes us on further like ken kesey wanted us to but to places not even he could have seen. We sing with them, the children in the streets as it rains on a hot summer day and we’re out dancing with umbrellas and it feels like 1959 and we sing with the choir and we know we’re just the buildup, that is our only true purpose in life before it ends and we sing, we repeat it so many times that you’d have to be on drugs or a little bit stupid to listen to it but we do because we are. Hey hey now now NOW, like a practicing ballet troupe we rehearse and go through each motion, each emotion and as we do so we sing with the choir and we build a world from words, an universe superimposed on the original and we create something new again, a black swan in ascent. But hey now hey now now, sing it and bleed it.