Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.

OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage.

The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on the Poster Time blog. Many of the interventions are quite playful, other times being rather loud with oscillating colours and lines.

Having just arrived back from the Creative Cities Summit, and hearing a really incredible presentation by the organizers of the Philadelphia Mural Arts project (which we’ve posted about before), I’m feeling rather anxious to consider how we could transform the many, many surfaces across the city that intensify the sense of non-place that seems endemic to Windsor.

Beautiful City is a new campaign based out of Toronto that is trying to persuade the city to create a tax for billboards that would do the following:

1. A historical 53% increase to the annual municipal funding available to all artists, festivals and arts institutions,
2. Close to $100 000.00 dollars for public realm improvement for each Toronto ward, every year – for projects such as greening,
3. Almost a 1/3 of a million dollars for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund accessible youth arts programming, and
4. Hiring 17 dedicated officers to enforce the new billboard bylaw.

The premise of the campaign is that billboard advertising, unlike all other forms of advertising, provides no content to the public in exchange for taking up public space (editorial to advertising ratios for TV is 75/25, for print is usually 50/50 but for billboards is 0 to 100).

Sounds like a fairly genius idea. What other ways could we think of generating new revenue for arts organizations in the city, given the likely continuing or eventual decline of funding for the arts in the city?

[via View on Canadian Art / image of Three Billboards About Love by Peter Fuss]

Oh, how I cannot wait for the day that we have some money to do something as big as this.

[via Heather is Watching]

Late last week, over 120 illegal billboards were taken over by Jordan Seiler’s incrediblely ambitious “New York Street Advertising Takeover.”

Organized as a reaction to the hundreds of billboards that are not registered with the city, and therefore are illegal (and yet not prosecuted by New York city), the NYSAT whitewashed and then over 80 artists went and repainted the spaces. Above is just one of the many treatments artists gave the former advertising space.

Conversation about looking into getting a small portion of the huge number of billboards going up in Windsor for artists was brought up at last night’s Artcite. Oh, the things we could do with billboard space.

[via Wooster Collective]