JUSTIN YOUNG

Below is the video documentation from The Artvertiser project in Berlin at Transmediale 2010. I submitted some digitally remixed billboards to replace existing ads which were included in the project. You can see my original post and submissions here.

“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.”

Artvertising Berlin, Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Rio is a beautiful and huge city. I saw some of the best sunsets ever there and that’s saying something because I have lived on the California coast for most of my life. Rio’s beaches face east-west and you can watch both the sunrise and sunset on the same beach. Rio has mountains that meet the ocean and they are filled with dense tropical forests. The various rock formations and mountains are what causes the amazing sunsets (at least that’s my theory), but i’ve never seen anything like it, look at the sky in these photos filled with rays.

The beaches in Rio are often filled with scenes like this:

And when you’re not on the beach there’s so many great places to check out with views of the whole city. Here’s some panoramas of the city from various locations.

Brazilian beach goers are pretty interesting. They are not body conscious like many Americans, you will frequently see 200+ pound women in bikinis. One of my favorite things about the Brazilian beach culture is everyone breaks into cheer and applause the moment the sun goes down. It’s amazing, especially when you are on a packed beach with thousands of people. One of the quirkiest things about Brazilian beach-goers is, they want to sit very close to each other. There will be miles of beach and for some reason they want to be right next to each other. I think it has something to do with a primitive herding mentality. This photo is one of my favorites from the trip. These people tried to recruit us into their cult, but we kept our distance.

Unfortunately our friend Bella had to head back to China for work. Booo! For her last night we decided to throw her a little going away party. A mustache party! Fortunately, I never travel without a few mustaches in tow.

We made dinner and had a few drinks and the girls chose their favorite mustaches. Our plan was to take the party to the local bar. Here they are getting ready…

We took the mustache party to the local bar, and to our surprise the locals had never seen girls with mustaches before.

They all caught on quick and within 15 minutes, we had a real mustache party happening!





We knew the party went well, when we left town the next day everyone waived as we drove off, we made a lot of new friends!

Our Brazilian friend Adnan who lives in San Francisco said Guarda do Embaú (map) is a must see place if you are in the Florianopolis area. It’s about 50km from the city centre and it takes 1-3 hours to get there. 3 hours in our case, because of course, they were setting dynamite charges in the hillsides along the highway. We spent two hours waiting around with 40 truckers, a few families, and a guy selling car phone chargers. Then finally, they let us pass! We made the turn onto an old cobblestone road and saw the sign for Guarda do Embaú!

We drove into town and checked out the various pousadas for the best place to stay. We chose the Pousada Da Preta, which is right in the center, close to the beach and places to eat and drink. We got a two bedroom place for R$150, roughly $30 per person. All places in Brazil seem to charge you per person, most of them give you a seriously home cooked breakfast included in the price.

The town has a rustic, island style feel, all cobblestone and dirt roads, lots of oxidized painted wooden buildings. Everyone is very laid back in town, and there’s lots of beach goers, surfers, and nomads selling handmade jewelry. Here are some photos of the town:

You can’t walk to the beach in Guarda, you either have to swim or take a boat. A small lagoon separates the town and the ocean. Water taxis shuttle people back and forth for R$2.

When you get out to the main part of the beach, there’s a few stands that sell food and drinks and rent things like chairs and umbrellas. The best surf is directly out front, and this is where i got the best surfing during the week. Local buses from Floripa drop people off here, so the main beach can get crowded during the day, but when you look down to the south, it’s completely pristine beach and sand dunes. Nothing but water, sand, and bird parties. We could have easily stayed here for a week.

And finally here are the post cards:

We were having drinks at a little bar in Guarda do Embau (map), when we saw lightning out over the ocean. The storm intensified and the lightning was lighting up the sky about every 20 seconds. I was able to snap these 6 photos with a hand held after about 100 tries.

Jan 25 was a brutal travel day, the kind you might expect when traveling overseas during Christmas in a snow storm. What we thought was going to be an easy flight with one connection from Salvador to Florianopolis (wiki), turned into a turbulent 4 city tour tour that lasted over 15 hours. We were diverted from Rio to Victoria because of bad weather and sat on a runway there until heading back to Rio. Our original flight had left so they put us on another carrier whose flight was delayed by 2 hours. We stopped in another city then finally landed in Florianopolis at 2 am. Wow! Someone told me before we left that when you ask how long it will take to drive somewhere, it’s common for Brazilians to say “it takes 6-12 hours to get there.” I didn’t think that would apply to air travel.

We finally arrived at the Hotel São Sebastião in Campeche (map) at 3am. The place is a little private oasis with two story brick cottages scattered about the property. It’s a short walk from the beach and our travel woes were long forgotten when we woke up to a perfect sunny day.

We walked down the beach a ways and saw a lady selling boat rides out to the lush little island about a half mile offshore. We gave her $R30 each and they packed our stuff up in a plastic bag and shuttled us out in zodiac style rubber boats. The island is called Ihla do Campeche (map), and when we arrived, they told us that it was an ecological preserve and we had to have a guide take us on hikes if we wanted to go. They also told us not to feed the little children that lived in the woods. When the guy finished his welcome spiel, Bella made sure we got the translation right and what he actually said was do not feed the little animals that live in the woods. No one on the island obeyed this order. As you can see, these little animals are very cute and they want your food!

These little Brazilian aardvarks are called Quati (wiki) and they are part of the raccoon family Procyonidae. We were contemplating taking one home because they seemed so friendly, but the waiter at the beach bar said they will bite on occasion, and that most dogs are no match for them. They also have rabies, and fairly large, razor sharp teeth. No one seem to care about this fact though, they kept eating out of peoples hands. Many of them were taking food back into this little opening in the forest, this went on for a couple hours until they all disappeared for a while. I kept picturing 20 Quati sitting at long table in the jungle, with a huge pile of food having thanksgiving. Meanwhile we were having our own feast, we ordered a huge anchovy cooked right there on the beach!

We spent all day at this picture perfect beach and at 4:30 they came to pick us up and shuttle us back to the main island. Here’s the post card…

A very long first day of travels, flew from SFO to Atlanta to Manaus which is in the Amazonas state of Brazil. I bought one of those super cheap tickets and had an 8 hour layover from 5am to 2pm. After about two hours of waiting around i hired a taxi to show me around the city. I figured how many chances will i get to see the Amazon. About 15 minutes after we got into the car it started raining heavily, it kept up for about an hour until the sides of the streets were about a foot deep. I didn’t get to get out of the car for the first hour, but heres a few photos from the initial drive around the city.

We drove to the Port of Manaus and got out of the car to see the Amazon, this was my first glimpse of it, it’s huge!

Here’s some more images from around the area.

Finally, my favorite part of the tour of Manaus was the public market. All sorts of exotic fruits and vegetables, meat butchers, fish and spices, it was pretty surreal walking through here after traveling for about 20 hours, here’s a video of the market, and some stills below.

Big thanks to my Manaus guide Jirley Lima! Here he is…

I’m heading south, way south! My first time going to South America and i’m so exited. This is a vacation, i mean it, going purely for fun this time. I will be flying into Salvador, arriving tomorrow, there for a couple of days to meet up with friends then on to an island called Florianopolis. I will be there from Jan 25 – Feb 1st, then off to Rio for a week. I fly home on the 18th of Feb. and have 10 days where I have no itinerary planned. So, if you got any ideas let me know. I will try and post the warmth as often as possible…See you soon!

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:

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.

And finally i got so tired of looking at that that i quickly gave this one a shot:

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.