The Artvertiser @ Transmedia 2010
A mobile urban exhibition platform. Think you’ve seen it before? Nomadic shipping container museum exhibits like Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow, or maybe you’re thinking of folks like Art Van who roll up and park right outside some of the fanciest galleries around during major openings and give art away. Well this Artvertiser concept is very unique, which is why i wanted to participate when i saw this post.
“The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art. The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.” Cool right? I certainly think so!
As of now, project initiator, artist, and developer Julian Oliver says: ” The software is stable and working well though is not yet ready for distribution. Currently it runs only on The Artvertiser’s own digital binoculars and netbooks/laptops with webcams. We’re still working on a port for Android.” Artists Clara Boj and Diego Diaz “are focusing on the hardware implementation of the Artvertiser Binoculars (Billboard Intercept Prototype).”
While all this seems so cool now, with hand helds and “binoculars”, i can only think of what the future may bring. Imagine when we’ll be able to plug our glasses into our PDA’s and immerse ourselves in personally chosen data layars. I don’t think it’s that far off. Remember the term virtual reality? I haven’t heard that one in years, but i feel like i hear the term augmented reality almost every day now. I think that augmented reality is going to be such a huge part of our lives soon and far into the future. We’re almost there, but we are already experiencing it in so many ways. There will be mega investment dollars from pretty much every industry i can think of, especially advertising/entertainment. There already is. What excites me about the Artvertiser concept is it will get people thinking about how they want to use this technology and maybe more importantly, how do we design and define the things we want to see in the world through the technology.
And finally… Here’s what i did: “The Artvertiser is looking for artwork to exhibit on urban billboards during Transmediale 2010 in Berlin. We are seeking interesting 2D artworks that criticise, recontextualize and remix the urban advertisements of Berlin.” So they posted a bunch of photos of advertisements on their Flickr page, and asked folks to “remix, alter or produce something entirely new that relates to the advert in question.”
I couldn’t resist submitting something so i threw a couple designs together…
The first one i chose was this Pall Mall ad:
Pall Mall Ad in Berlin
What i liked about this ad is that it’s blatant. Smoke some of this sunshine! “The world tastes better…” I was also curious about the glowing word “tiefpreisgarantie.” Google translates it as ‘ll deliver, another service translates it (i would guess literally) as “depth price guarantee.” Depth price guarantee? I automatically thought death price guarantee, so i reverse translated that and i got this word: todpreisgarantie. Tod means death in german, tod-preis-garantie. Kind of funny…Not sure if it will translate in Germany.
Not sure which one i like the most out of these, there something about all three of them doesn’t exactly work, i think it’s too bottom heavy in the text area. I played with the themes, heaven, death, lung cancer, and money, got a little bogged, then had to put it down.
Remixed German Pall Mall Ad - Heaven
Remixed German Pall Mall Ad - Lung Cancer
Remixed German Pall Mall Ad - Death
And finally i got so tired of looking at that that i quickly gave this one a shot:
la-roche-ad-berlin
Remixed La Roche Ad
I also did these two below, but i’m most fond of the girl above. Although i’m not exactly sure how the technology will render, I thought it would be nice in both submissions to see the remnants of the original ad. Artvertiser is accepting 2d submissions for this project until Jan. 26, 2010.
Laroche Ad Remix
Laroche Ad Remix
[...] Below is the video documentation from The Artvertiser project in Berlin at Transmediale 2010. I submitted some digital remixed billboards to replace existing ads which were included in the project. You can see my original post and submissions here. [...]