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黑 鳥 Musings on contemporary art issues. Graffiti, street culture, urban painting, new media art, Second Life, blogging, internet resources, music, film, video & anything else that comes up. London Edition.
keep your eyes open, and if you see the police, or some off duty fireman who wants to be a hero run. run and don't stop, run to a place cars cant get to like train tracks and run until your veins pump battery acid, then run some more. i've had had 6 cops chasing after me for half a night. hop some fences, stash anything that could used against you and keep running.
we rarely get caught, thats why police hate us so much.
Seeking to market its handheld game device to hip city dwellers, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the gadget. But the guerrilla marketing gambit appears to be drawing scorn from some of the street-savvy hipsters it's striving to win over.
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers' computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, the campaign for the PlayStation Portable is being derided on the internet as an attempt to buy the credibility of street art.
In San Francisco, critics have expressed their disapproval by adding some spray paint of their own to the Sony ads. On a wall outside a beer garden in San Francisco's bohemian Mission District that caters to motorcyclists and bike messengers, someone spray-painted over every character, adding the commentary, "Advertising directed at your counter-culture."
Outside Casa Maria, a small Mission bodega, someone wrote, "Get out of my city," added the word "Fony" to the graffiti and penned a four-line ditty slamming Sony.
Other cities targeted in the campaign include New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Miami, according to Sony spokeswoman Molly Smith.
The advertising, based on original artwork commissioned by Sony's ad agency, features a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle or a rocking horse, but doesn't include the word Sony or PSP anywhere.
When asked about the criticism, Smith countered that art is subjective and that both the content and the medium dovetailed with Sony's belief that the PSP is a "disrupter product" that lets people play games, surf the internet and watch movies wherever they want.
"With PSP being a portable product, our target is what we consider to be urban nomads, people who are on the go constantly," Smith said.
Floyd Hayes, the head creative director at Cunning Work, which specializes in nontraditional marketing campaigns such as promoting a Sci-Fi Channel TV show about the Bermuda triangle through reward signs for a missing sock, doesn't disapprove of the campaign, though he thinks the seemingly hypnotized kids in the artwork might send the wrong message about the PSP's thrill factor.
But Hayes doesn't think Sony has crossed any lines with the faux street art. "Sony and PSP have every right to use this type of media," Hayes said. "They have done it for (a) very long time very successfully and spoke the language of the streets without being patronizing."
Piers Fawkes, who runs the IF blog that focuses on new currents in marketing, also liked the campaign.
"It's a cheeky wink toward a savvy audience who are already familiar with the product," Fawkes said. "It's reflective of modern approach to marketing. The creative classes are sick of marketing when done badly or blandly, but when it's done in (an) intelligent manner, we appreciate it."
Fawkes questioned whether the backlash was very widespread.
"I wonder if that's a San Francisco phenomenon," Fawkes said. "I know there's certain mindset there."
Sony isn't the first corporation to use graffiti and stencils to market its products. In 2001, IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco more than $120,000 in fines and clean-up costs after its advertising agency spray-painted Linux advertisements on the cities' sidewalks.
Unlike IBM, however, Sony says it's paying businesses and building owners for the right to graffiti their walls.
Casa Maria was paid $100 for two weeks' use of its wall, according to co-owner Mario Arana.
I handle these files discreetly with respect to the privacy and anonymity of the people concerned.yeah right
Andrew Schoultz (San Francisco) makes large, elaborate wall paintings and installations which in scale and scope, derive from his background in graffiti and public mural projects. Using his own repertoire of iconic images which include elephants, smokestacks, ships, and tornados, he addresses social and political issues. His installations incorporate recyclable materials such as discarded wood panels and scraps, reinforcing his ongoing political critique of society by using the remnants of consumer culture as media for his work. Recently, he executed a site-specific mural for Oracles and Ruminations at the Sara Nightingale Gallery (Watermill, NY) and was included in Lifecycle Analysis at the Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco).
Embracing his graffiti origins, Greg Lamarche (New York) creates small, intricate paper collages focusing on text and fonts. His work combines commercially printed and custom cut letters and words in a profusion of font styles, word fragments, and multiple layers, which combine to form new meanings and associations. For example, his collage Not Free, is comprised of hundreds of pieces of paper printed with the word “free” assembled in such a way to spell out the word “not.” By using objects that are considered disposable, Lamarche’s media, taken from such sources as restaurant delivery menus and magazine subscription cards, comments on societal and monetary values related to art, labor, and commodity. His work is currently featured in the Dreamland Artist Club, a public art project in Coney Island, NY and will be on view in Process and Progress at the McCaig-Welles Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), in November.
Craig Costello (New York) is known for creating and mixing his own ink, “KRINK” a longtime practice which he initially used in graffiti. He currently uses his custom ink to cover a variety of surfaces and spaces both indoor and outdoor with long, sloppy drips of pigment. In outdoor spaces, he takes familiar objects such as a mailbox or a doorway, which he identifies as a minimal pieces of sculpture, and redefines them by using long flowing drips of ink or paint which outline, and rearticulate the space in a way that lends itself both to sculpture and painting. In an indoor, gallery context, his sculptures and paintings are comprised of minimal shapes or sculptures with drips on the surface. Because he creates the surface or sculpture, as opposed to painting on existing outdoor objects, he brings some of his root street sensibility to a more formal arena. Currently his works are the subject of a twelve-page spread in the upcoming September issue of Arkitip magazine.
Alicia McCarthy (San Francisco) uses found materials in her installations and assemblages (stemming from her background in street art), while her paintings are reminiscent of abstract landscapes, composed of many lines forming grids, or arcs of color weaving on top of, and under each other, in an almost textile-like fashion. Her work consists of intentional mishappenings, yet they are uncontrolled, paralleling day to day life, relationships between the living world and its connections or disconnections, and perceiving as opposed to perception. Alicia McCarthy lives and works in Oakland, California and has exhibited her work both locally and internationally and will be part of the University of California, Berkeley, MFA program this fall.
"The breakdown as you have listed seems much more informative than the online articles I have seen that do seem to be saying 'hey aint this great, only 10% of dutch are racists!'.. "Other links discussing the study: