Guerrilla Art

Looks like companies are going a step further with their urban art ad campaigns. After using stencils for guerrilla advertising, paying graffiti artists to paint some backdrops or planning large action street theater, they are now willing to let their ad agencies install impressing advert sculptures… Belgian paint manufacturer Levis (Akzo Nobel) recently came up with an urban guerrilla paint sculpture! The installation, planned and created by Belgian ad agency King George, consists of an XXL Levis paint pot mounted onto an existing lamppost eight metres above the ground so it appears to be floating. The post itself has been painted red, creating a stream of paint that looks like it is coloring the car park where it is situated, as was described on designboom.com. ...

For a lot of people around the globe, the stencil artworks by British street art icon Banksy are the quintessence of politically influenced street art comedy. Whether the flower throwing anarchist, the peace symbol painting soldiers, or even the Child Drawing series, Banksy knows how to combine political statements with more or less subtle jokes… Not long ago, the Twitter account Banksy Ideas was registered, describing itself as The R&D dept at Banksy HQ and developing parodying ideas for new Banksy-like stencil artworks. Here’s some of my favorites: ...

Is Pasha 183 (also P183) the Russian Banksy? Since January, the international urban art scene debates about this controversial question… P183 is a Moscow born and based multi media artist, whose work has recently received international coverage and acclaim. On January 31, 2012 the British Guardian published an online post about Moscow’s Banksy and his street art and started in that way an worldwide media campaign including internet-wide discussions about whether the British are going to declare each and every urban hacktivist or public intervention artist as a new Banksy… ...

In one of the industrial harbours along the Rhine river, a light graffiti crew used the strange, dirty and old scenery to awake Gorillas! GorillaLighting is a light art crew from Germany who is not just projecting Gorilla faces onto facades, but also (probably inspired by Luzinterruptus) illuminating plants, recently for the Luminale festival in Frankfurt. Projected as light graffiti the gorilla portrait breathes nocturnal life into the unreal world. Huge fronts cry for attention. Grotesque steel giants wait for a character. ...

With a 15 meters high Space Invader game, urban installation artist Luke Egan aka Filthy Luker just invaded Manchester! Made of road work barriers and traffic cones the Space Invader game is fully interactive - the required software comes from Jnr Hacksaw - what makes it becoming something like a center of attraction in the city of Manchester… The project is a work in progress and under deconstruction, coming to some scaffolding near you soon! ...

Self-proclaimed urban hacktivist Florian Rivière is in Berlin right now. Inspired by the hackers culture, the Frenchman reinvests and diverts public space to allow citizens to reclaim their environment. His interventions, located between urban design, DIY and upcycling (upgrading waste), have the particularity to be spontaneous and raw, exclusively made with objects found in the street, and always with humor… Games, furnishings, traps, maps, instructions… so many urban tactics to show the functionality of sites, and direct action of the user on urban space. (Florian Rivière) ...

This subway parasite project is quite old, it was invented by Frédéric Eyl at the University of the Arts in Berlin back in 2005 (long before about 2,200 people liked Urban Art Core on Facebook), but it’s that great that I have to share it with you… Parasite is an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Parasite projects films inside a tunnel. These tunnels bear something mystic – most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Confusing the routine of your train-travelling-journey, your habits and perception the projections parallel worlds – making use of parasite – allow you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery. (thegreeneyl.com) ...

The massive paint attack which took place two years ago at Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin, was one of the most impressing urban art interventions I’ve seen so far in town. Organized and executed by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh and his team, the so-called Painting Reality project recently was the force behind a similar paint attack in Sao Paulo… Painting Reality in Brazil As a part of the Baixo Centro Festival which took place during the last week in Brazil’s biggest metropolis, a group of activists tipped out several buckets of colorful paint on a much used junction and started in that way the great process of an urban live painting, using cars, bikes and pedestrians as brushes, spreading the paint all over the streets! Again it’s just amazing to see how easily you can color your city and have a lot of fun. ...

Advertisment confuse every day our choises exalting qualities that doesn’t exist and creating a sort of shame world. Today, in a moment of financial insecurity, we must discover the real value and authenticity of what we have and we need. (BR1) Italian street artist BR1 just came up with a new, inspiring and very critical street installation, presenting crumpled poster ads destroying a window of a Berlin bus shelter. This installation is not vandalism in the first place, it’s much more a creative metaphor trying to get to the bottom of today’s advert-society. It illustrates the everyday fight between ads and urban environment and it is also using a certain humorous remark and wink, what makes it a simple, but effective piece of urban artwork. ...

As I already wrote, ad takeovers have a long tradition in the international street art scene, especially in Berlin. Now, a guy called Vermibus took over some ad light boxes near Kottbuser Tor, Frankfurter Tor and Jannowitzbrücke in Berlin’s city and mutated the shown persons into some ugly, scary monsters! Looks like he used some kind of paint remover or buffing stuff to modify the advert posters…or maybe it’s just paint on the windows…not sure… ...