Guerrilla Art

Bosso Fataka, that is a group of four Berlin-based artists, being well-known in town for using cling wrap as adhesive to turn trash into sculptures in public spaces. Recently, the world’s largest international multimedia news agency Reuters did a nice video feature on them, entitled Berlin artists turn trash into sculpture… Their pieces remain no longer than a couple of weeks, until municipal workers remove them, leaving photographs on their Facebook page as the sole documentation of their activity. ...

Remember the yarn-bombed Wall Street Bull? Now, Polish street artist Olek struck again when she covered the almost 9 meters tall memorial statue of Albert Einstein at the National Academy of Science in Washington DC! Unfortunately, the city cleaned the yarn-bombed Einstein within hours… Olek says Einstein, for her, was an easy choice since he was such a creative thinker himself. “I thought he might have a sense of humor about it,” she says. […] Presumably this kind of thing is par for the course when you’re a guerrilla yarn-bomber. (Washingtonian) ...

With urban artists like Ox, Ludo, Vermibus or Neko being specialized in this kind of critical vandalism and cities like Berlin and Madrid getting ad-busted on a grand scale, street ad takeovers seem to be quite popular these days. Now it’s Toronto’s turn… Mainly targeting billboards and advertisement street signs, the cARTographyTO crew has been responsible for 35 ad-busting hacks all over Toronto. A spokesperson for cARTographyTO stated, These structures are billboards masquerading as sources of useful public information. When you look at the pillars, it’s hard to find the maps, and this goes against the City’s own public space guidelines. How could City Hall allow this to happen? Beyond mere visual pollution, these pillars are a safety hazard. And Astral’s influence on our city is a public insult and embarrassment - more power has been given to those who already have the loudest voices, to the detriment of all who use these spaces. ...

Berlin-based ad takeover artist Vermibus shows how it’s done! Using nothing more than some brushes and different solvents, Vermibus transforms popular advertising posters of fashion models (e.g. Kate Moss) and puts them back to the streets… The gesture of erasing the images with solvent is similar to the gesture of painting, but it is painting counter action. The process is the same, but it is not adding colours on a canvas to create an image, it is removing the colors of an existing photographic image to create a new image and new characters. The models of the adverts have mutated. Some look like ghosts or mummies, some are reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s paintings, some of tribal make-up. ...

Florian Rivière is an urban hacktivist. Some would call him a genius, I would describe him as a man with an eye for the small things in urban life. One of his latest small urban projects was the creation of a free urban exercise bike in Paris… Take one of those circulating city bikes, swing out the kickstand and you have your personal urban exercise bike! That’s it, so simple but nevertheless people are still paying for biking sessions in their local fitness studio. An absurdity. ...

Benjamin Gaulon, aka Recyclism, has an interesting hobby: For his 2.4 GHz project, he installs wireless video receiver in public space to hack into wireless CCTV cameras… This device (which is now part of consumers popular products), can be used for wireless surveillance cameras, but it can also be used for parents to monitor their children. Such systems are becoming more popular as they get cheaper. But what most users of those devices don’t realise is that they are broadcasting the signal. (2.4 GHz Project) ...

Spontaneous sculpture artist Brad Downey and Akay (tenderly named Brakay) again visited the lovely Italian city of Grottaglie! For Fame Festival 2012, both artists created an explosive paint installation consisting of several paint bombs, colorizing an abandoned house… Not sure how they initialized the detonations, but it looks like they did not use electricity to do that. Maybe it’s some kind of yeast or something like that. If anyone has a clue, please write a comment - I’d love to have some details! ...

I just stumbled upon a six month old project by Czech urban art crew EPOS 257 entitled Urban Shooting Paintings! For the Urban Shooting Paintings EPOS 257, who became popular with the 50 square meters of public space intervention in Prague, uses homemade weapon and ammunition… The theme – a gesture signalling an attack – remains the same. Its essence, however, relates more to the very roots of guerrilla art, established at the end of the 1960s in the US by activist groups refashioning billboard adverts.I move around with the weapon in the open urban landscape. In my case, it is not an attack on a particular advert but billboard as a medium in general, which in this context represents a painter’s canvas in the urban landscape. (EPOS 257) ...

A few days ago, French urban hacktivist Florian Rivière (the guy who installed the fabulous advertising carousel earlier this year) did a Hack your city into a soccer field workshop in Berlin-Kreuzberg! Soccer is one of the basic ways to reclaim the street. But today cities prevent this practice to facilitate car movements and security. Games or sports are just allowed in specific places: soccer fields, golf courses, skateparks, basketball courts… everything is confined. The aim of this workshop is to look for interstitials urban space where we could play soccer wildly. Because play is a claim of freedom and city is a place for freedom. ...

Berlin’s creative studio Cheesecake Powerhouse just came up with a new urban intervention: They installed street lamp light switches in public space! And although that’s not suitable for the mass, it’s in my opinion a brilliant idea, especially for smaller neighbourhoods, parks or almost uninhabited urban areas… The Cheesecake Powerhouse was founded 2012 in Berlin by Chehad Abdallah, Eugenio Perazzo, Fabian Greitemann and Julian Stahl and usually operates in various design disciplines. Nevertheless, they work with people coming from all kinds of disciplinary backgrounds like video production, copywriting, strategy, skateboarding, graffiti or digital, what becomes visible in that recent street lamp light switch installation. So what’s next? ...