A few months ago, i bought a lovely baby blue summer dress with the face of Karl Marx printed all over it. I was made slightly uncomfortable by the irony of acting like a victim of capitalism in the face of and to the detriment of the father of anti-capitalism. I also had the feeling that, somewhere, a bunch of cynical and astute artists were making fun of me. Because that's exactly what happened. The provocative brand has a slogan 'Be Like Us, Be Different', and a shop, located at the time in an art exhibition room, right inside LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon. Gallery visitors could buy jeans carrying the MARX® logo, boys short-sleeve shirts with the same pattern as the said blue dress and some very expensive MARX® shoes. The shop has now moved to another museum, the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

The artists/company who designed and market the dress are Berlin-based art collective PSJM, made up of Pablo San José and Cynthia Viera. PSJM acts as an trademark of happening art addressing issues of the artwork in the market, communication with consumers, or function as an artistic quality, using communication resources borrowed from capitalism of the spectacle to underscore the paradoxes produced by its unbridled development.

Having googled the name of the artists i found a series of interviews, statement texts and essays so interesting that i immediately thought that it would be foolish of me to stop my enthusiasm at the cuteness of a blue dress. Hence this interview (the original version of PSJM's answers is in spanish, i pasted it at the bottom of this post):

PSJM is made of artist Pablo San José and management graduate Cynthia Viera. Excuse the banality of my prejudice but how can people with such a different background manage to dialog? What brought you together? Did Cynthia's mindset and knowledge influence Pablo's artistic practice and view of the contemporary art landscape? And vice-versa, have Cynthia's management skills been "affected" by her collaboration with an artist?

In reality we do not have such different backgrounds. At some point during his artistic career, Pablo worked for some years as a creative for a big corporation of the advertisement sector, creating campaigns and brand images for international companies. In 1998, and in parallel to his work in publicity, Pablo decided that his artistic signature would become a brand. He was interested by the promotion processes of artistic brands and its parallelism with other commercial brands. He then started a work that continues today, a project that builds itself with each work realized. "The artist is the brand, the work is the product" became the slogan of the PSJM brand. In 2003, Cynthia, a graduate in Direction of International Commerce and Marketing, and until then working as the Head of Marketing Services for a major telecommunication company, joined the project. With her arrival, the theoretical objectives to work under the same structures as a company and to legally establish the team as a commercial brand became reality. We work as a team in which the point of view of each of us affects without a doubt the work of the other one. However, we both use the same language. Pablo doesn't correspond to the typical romantic idea of the artist more than Cynthia fits the usual profile of an executive who puts the quest for maximum benefits above social or aesthetic commitments.

Photo: © LABoral - Author Marcos Morilla

One of the striking elements of the MARX® brand is the price. All the garments, be they jeans or dress, carry the same price tag (220,40 euros), while the one and only shoe available costs way more than most people could afford. What were the motivations behind the price tags?

While the main objective of marketing is to satisfy the client in exchange of economic benefits, we use marketing as a critical tool that enables us to provide consumers with an aesthetic or intellectual gratification. We use the "4 Ps" of the Marketing Mix (Product, Price, Promotion and Placement) to interweave a strategy of meaning where each of these
"Ps" is regarded as a creative opportunity, as a poetic license. This way, the product constitute the artwork, the price constitutes the artwork the promotion is in itself an artwork and the distribution (placement) is also part and parcel of the artwork. We like to call 'Marketing experimental' this process of experimentation of a representational kind.

With MARX® we have used once again the price as a poetic license and vehicle of meaning. The fact that garments exhibited have a high price tag creates some kind of reflective impotence in the mind of the visitor who has finally the opportunity to act as a consumer in the museum space but is inhibited by the aspect of the aspect of exclusivity of the goods. In any case and in order to keep the work alive and continue creating meanings and mixing reality and fiction, and because the next exhibition of the garments will be at the CAAM in July, they will be on sale. Let's see what happens.

I don't know if you've read about the fight that the daughter of Che Guevara is putting to protect her father's image.

How did you deal with the thought that some people might come up and criticize you for using Marx' figure in a way that they consider to "be an affront to his dignity"? And did you at any moment think that you'd encounter a censorship similar to the one you experienced with one of your previous works, Project Asia?

The experimental aspect of our projects involves a certain dose of uncertainty once we are launching the work. Even if you try to direct the work towards a certain meaning you never know the kind of reaction you're going to encounter. All along our career we had to face anything from censorships from brands, complains from right-wing to passionate critiques, either negative or favorable.

On the other hand, in this case, it would be difficult for any brand to censor us, as Adidas did with the Asia Project. The first conceptual and practical step of the MARX® project consisted in registering the brand MARX®, and it is this action which really supports the main axis of the artwork, the rest can only be seen as its natural development.

Photo: © LABoral - Author Marcos Morilla

The MARX® project was accompanied with a promotional campaign in the streets of Gijon. The promo posters looked like any other posters designed by mainstream fashion brand. The general public, whether they wanted it or not, was thus in direct contact with your project. How much do you value their look and reaction to your work? Do you give it more credit and importance than you would give to an art critic or to anyone familiar with artistic discourses?

For us it is crucial that our proposals should not remain exclusively at the reach of the cultural elite. The commitment to open up our discourse to a broader public is at the basis of our work, we strive to create pieces which have two levels of lectures and try to unite experimentation and communication. We call this difficult operation " the dilemma of Mayakovsky", as it was a theme that kept the Russian poet awake at night. To achieve this we use the media and the strategies of mass culture. The broad public understands perfectly its language and this provides us with a space for experimenting while generating various meanings. However, we also have the objective of placing our proposals inside the theoretical discourse of contemporary art, all our projects involve a text which we write ourselves and which constitutes and additional element of the art piece. Our work can be situated between reality and the art institution, both spheres are important to us.

You obviously don't share Takashi Murakami's bulldozer and very mercantile approach. However, MARX® and other projects of yours evoke (to me at least and under certain aspects) the Japanese artist's exploration of the merging between consumer goods and artwork, art fetishism, the demythification of the concept of art work as a one-off, etc. Am i writing a total heresy or do you somehow see some similarities between his approach and yours?

Who are the other artists you feel close to?

There are indeed many aspects in Murakami's work which makes us feel quite close to his line of work but also many others which sets us apart from it. The ones that connect us to his way of producing art are the ones that you enumerated. Those that distance us from Murakami are his lack of critique and his ideological positioning regarding the establishment. Murakami follows the trail of Warhol and Koons, but he doesn't go further, let's say that it's a development of apolitical Pop. Murakami's main concern is to make money. His is a very nationalist position, and we find that totally outdated and dangerously conservative. However, our peculiarity is that we combine spheres which seem to be antagonistic and shortcircuit meanings. Our vision of artistic production, organized in the same way as a company where the creator is presented as professional with a defined social function, follows the tracks of thinkers such as Proudhon or Benjamin, who reject the figure of the 'artist as a genius' and propose the one of the 'artist as a worker', a position that the Russian Productivists made their best to put into practice all the while enjoying the support from the Party. Just as Modernity gave way to postmodernity and production lost its importance in the favour of consumption, the company became brand. This conversion of the company into brand recovered in a sense the mythologico-symbolical value of genius to give way to an apparently paradoxical artist-brand which behaviour is strategically planned, scientifically programmed. On the one hand the elitist and godlike figure of the romantic artist is de-mythified. On the other hand, a new myth is created, and this time it is coldly designed under the rules of marketing applied to the world of art. The paradox, the blending of antagonist and irreconcilable forces constantly underpins the way we make art.

Consumer Demonstration, Mural Installation, 2007

We don't really find any artist whose line of work corresponds to ours, but if we had to give a couple of names it would be the Spanish group Democracia and the artistic corporation Etoy. We admire their work a lot.

Many of your works have a very strong provocative element to them which makes them very appealing for the media. How much is the "shock tactic" important in your practice?

Our work owes much to the Dadaist and Constructivist tradition and to its commitment to merge art with life. Today, reality is built by the media and if we want to be involved in reality we have to step into the media.

Nudist Zone, FIB-Art '05, Intervention on the beach of Benicassim, August 2005

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

We are currently working on two projects which will be presented in 2009, in various galleries and institutions. Unfortunately we cannot reveal their content as we are still at the creative and production stage, but we can tell you that in one of the projects we will be using a traditional technique: painting. Our subject focuses on merchandise and painting is still the number one merchandise in the world of art.

The MARX® shop at LABoral has now closed. If people want to buy one of those shirts and jeans, is there any other gallery (or shop?) they should turn to?

The MARX® project was produced by LABoral in collaboration with CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands. That's where they will travel from July to October. We are also working on its international distribution, but it is still to early to reveal the name of the possible spaces.

Thanks Cynthia and Pablo!

The MARX® exhibition is running though October 12, 2008 at the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain.

Spanish version of the interview:

Image Marcos Morilla, courtesy of LABoral Centro de Arte

PSJM is made of artist Pablo San José and management graduate Cynthia Viera. Excuse the banality of my prejudice but how can people with such a different background manage to dialog? What brought you together? Did Cynthia's mindset and knowledge influence Pablo's artistic practice and view of the contemporary art landscape? And vice-versa, have Cynthia's management skills been "affected" by her collaboration with an artist?

En realidad no tenemos backgrounds tan diferentes. En una etapa de su carrera artística Pablo trabajó bastantes años como creativo publicitario en una gran multinacional del sector creando anuncios e imagen de marca para empresas internacionales. Paralelamente a su labor como creativo publicitario, en 1998 Pablo decidió que su firma artística se convertiría en marca. Le interesaban los procesos de promoción de las firmas artísticas y su paralelismo con el resto de firmas comerciales y comenzó un trabajo que aún continúa, un proyecto que se construye con cada obra realizada. "El artista es la marca, la obra es el producto" pasó a ser el slogan de la marca PSJM. En 2003 Cynthia, licenciada en Dirección de Comercio Internacional y Marketing, y hasta esa fecha Responsable de Servicios de Marketing de una gran compañía de telecomunicaciones, se incorpora al proyecto haciendo realidad las intenciones teóricas de trabajar bajo las estructuras propias de la empresa y formalizar legalmente el equipo como una marca comercial. Desarrollamos un trabajo en equipo donde los puntos de vista de uno afectan sin lugar a dudas al trabajo del otro, pero ambos utilizamos el mismo lenguaje. Ni Pablo se corresponde con la imagen típica del artista romántico, ni Cynthia encaja con el perfil típico de una ejecutiva que persiga el máximo beneficio por encima de compromisos sociales o estéticos.

One of the striking element of the MARX® brand is the price. All the garments, be they jeans or dress, carry the same price tag (220,40 euros), while the one and only shoe available costs way more than most people could afford. What were the motivations behind the price tags?

Mientras que el marketing consiste en proporcionar satisfacción al cliente obteniendo un beneficio económico a cambio de ello como principal objetivo, nosotros utilizamos el marketing como una herramienta crítica que pueda proporcionar una satisfacción estética o intelectual al consumidor. Las "4 Ps" del Marketing Mix (product, price, promotion y placement) nos sirven para entretejer una estrategia de significación en la que cada una de estas "Ps" es tomada como una oportunidad creativa, cada "P" es utilizada como licencia poética. De este modo el producto constituye obra, el precio constituye obra, la promoción se presenta como obra y la distribución (placement) es también una parte integrante de la obra. Nos gusta llamar Marketing experimental a este proceso de experimentación de índole representacional.

Con MARX® una vez más hemos utilizado el precio como licencia poética y vehículo de significación, el hecho de que las prendas que se exhiben tengan un precio alto, crea una cierta sensación de impotencia reflexiva en el espectador, que por fin puede consumir en un museo pero se ve coartado por el carácter exclusivo de la mercancía. En todo caso y para mantener la pieza viva, seguir creando significado y entremezclando la realidad con la ficción, ya que la exposición en el CAAM comienza en julio, se harán rebajas. Veremos qué pasa.

I don't know if you've read about the fight that the daughter of Che Guevara is putting to protect her father's image.

How did you deal with the thought that some people might come up and criticize you for using Marx' figure in a way that they consider to "be an affront to his dignity"? And did you at any moment think that you'd encounter a censorship similar to the one you experienced with your Asia project?

El carácter experimental de nuestros proyectos conlleva también una cierta incertidumbre una vez que "lanzas" la obra, aunque intentes dirigirla hacia una significación determinada nunca sabes con qué tipo de reacción te vas a encontrar. A o largo de nuestra carrera hemos tenido desde censuras de marcas, pasando por quejas de vecinos derechistas a críticas fervorosas, tanto negativas como favorables. Por ejemplo, con la intervención pública en forma de campaña publicitaria de MARX® en Gijón, a priori esperábamos algún tipo de reacción violenta al ver asociado el nombre del padre del comunismo con la estética de la moda, tanto más si tenemos en cuenta la tradición revolucionaria de Asturias, pero para nuestra sorpresa el público ya está tan acostumbrado al absurdo de los mensajes paradójicos del mercado que la pieza se diluyó en la realidad al completo. Por otro lado, en este caso difícilmente una marca nos puede censurar, como sucedió con Adidas en Proyecto Asia, ya que el primer paso conceptual y práctico del proyecto MARX® consistió en registrar la marca MARX®, y es realmente esta acción lo que supone el eje primordial de la obra, el resto únicamente puede ser visto como su desarrollo natural.

The MARX® project was accompanied by a promotional campaign in the streets of Gijon. The promo posters looked like any other posters designed by mainstream fashion brand. The general public, whether they wanted it or not, was thus in direct contact with your project. How much do you value their look and reaction to your work? Do you give it more credit and importance than you would give to an art critic or to anyone familiar with artistic discourses?

Para nosotros es primordial que nuestras propuestas no se queden exclusivamente en el terreno de la elite cultural, en la base de nuestro trabajo subyace el empeño de ampliar el discurso a un público más amplio, nos afanamos en crear obras con dos niveles de lectura intentando hermanar experimentación y comunicación. A esta difícil empresa la llamamos "el dilema de Maiakovski", ya que este tema le quitaba el sueño al poeta ruso. Para conseguir esto nos servimos de los medios y estrategias de la cultura de masas, el público medio comprende este lenguaje a la perfección y nos brinda un campo con el que poder experimentar generando significados distintos. Sin embargo también tenemos como objetivo instalar nuestras propuestas en el seno del discurso teórico del arte contemporáneo, todos nuestros proyectos incluyen un texto redactado por nosotros que consideramos un elemento más de la obra total. Ciertamente nuestro trabajo se mueve entre la realidad y la institución arte, ambas esferas son importantes para nosotros.

You obviously don't share Takashi Murakami' bulldozer and very mercantile approach. However, MARX® and other projects of yours evoke (to me at least and under certain aspects) the Japanese artist's exploration of the merging between consumer goods and artwork, art fetishism, the demythification of the concept of art work as a one-off, etc. Am i writing a total heresy or do you somehow see some similarities between his approach and yours?

Who are the other artists you feel close to?

Efectivamente hay muchos aspectos de la obra de Murakami que nos acercan a su línea de trabajo y muchos otros que nos separan de él. Los que nos vinculan a su modo de producir arte tú misma los has expuesto. Lo que nos distancia de Murakami es su falta de crítica y su posicionamiento ideológico cercano al stablishment. Murakami sigue la estela de Warhol y Koons, pero no va más allá, digamos que es un desarrollo del Pop apolítico. A Murakami le interesa hacer dinero como principal objetivo. Él tiene además un fuerte posicionamiento nacionalista, algo que a nosotros nos resulta totalmente desfasado y peligrosamente conservador. Sin embargo nuestra singularidad es que combinamos mundos aparentemente irreconciliables para crear cortocircuitos de sentido. Nuestra visión de la producción artística organizada al modo de una empresa, en la que el creador aparece como un profesional con una función social definida, sigue la estela trazada por pensadores como Proudhon o Benjamin, que rechazan la figura del artista-genio y proponen aquella otra del artista-obrero, postura que también los productivistas rusos se encargaron de llevar a la práctica mientras gozaron del apoyo del aparato del Partido. Sin embargo, del mismo modo que la modernidad dejó paso a la postmodernidad y la producción cedió su importancia al consumo, la empresa devino marca. Con lo que esta conversión de la empresa en marca recupera de algún modo el valor mitológico-simbólico del genio para configurar un aparentemente contradictorio artista-marca cuyo comportamiento es estratégicamente planificado, científicamente programado. Así que mientras por un lado se desmitifica la imagen elitista y endiosada del artista romántico, por otro se genera un nuevo mito, esta vez fríamente diseñado bajo los presupuestos de la mercadotecnia aplicada al mundo del arte. Lo paradójico, la conjunción de fuerzas opuestas e irreconciliables sobrevuela constantemente nuestro modo de hacer arte.

Realmente no encontramos ningún artista que coincida con esta línea de trabajo, pero si tuviéramos que apuntar un par de nombres serían el grupo español Democracia y la corporación artística Etoy. El trabajo de ambos grupos nos interesa y nos produce una gran admiración.

Many of your works have a very strong provocative element to them which makes them very appealing for the media. How much is the "shock tactic" important in your practice?

Nuestro trabajo está en deuda con la tradición dadaista y constructivista y su compromiso de fundir arte y vida. Hoy la realidad la construyen los medios de comunicación, si queremos intervenir en la realidad debemos introducirnos en los medios.

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

Estamos ahora preparando dos proyectos que se presentarán en el 2009, en diferentes galerías e instituciones. Por desgracia no podemos desvelar su contenido ya que aún nos encontramos en proceso de creación y producción, pero sí te podemos adelantar que en uno de ellos se utilizará la técnica tradicional de pintura. Nuestro discurso está centrado en la mercancía y la pintura sigue siendo la mercancía reina en el mundo del arte.

The MARX® shop at LABoral has now closed. If people want to buy one of those shirts and jeans, is there any other gallery (or shop?) they should turn to?

El proyecto MARX® ha sido producido por la LABoral en colaboración con el CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria en la Isla Canarias. Allí viajará en julio y permanecerá hasta octubre. También estamos trabajando en su difusión internacional aunque aún es pronto para adelantar el nombre de los posibles espacios.

10 days ago, i was in Ghent for the festival The Game is Up! at the Vooruit. Artists who study the relationship between art and consumerism were invited to perform, and present their work to explore this year's theme: Art for Sale.

Vending machines, installed all around Vooruit magnificent 1913 building, were packed with surprise objects made by the artists who participated to the exhibition: t-shirts, 5 euro banknotes inside blank envelopes, badges, crazy eyeglasses to see what is happening behind your back, etc.

Eva De Groote had invited me to moderate a couple of Fricties Salons. That's how i finally got to have dinner with one of my heroes, Heath Bunting, saw a performance of Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, had drinks and a lot of laughs with the smart and hilarious Christophe Bruno and the guy who resuscitated net.art Carlos Katastrofky. Definitely one of the most exciting events of this year for me (so far). Bliss-a-lujah!

Photo indymedia

On Saturday March 8, i was walking on a cloud telling myself what a lucky person i was to present a FrictiesSalon with the masked and magnificent guys of the Billboard Liberation Front.

Not that it has been a piece of cake. How do you introduce people who should not be introduced? Who have to keep their identity secret in order to be able to keep on doing their own activities? All i could find in the press were stories about the CIA or Mafia like secrecy that surrounds them and implies that "Spouses and friends do not know that the members are in the organization."

"Improving outdoor advertising since 1977" is the catchphrase of the Billboard Liberation Front. The idea is simple: by making small adjustments to billboards, the BLF creates ironic and often highly critical street marketing campaigns. By changing just a few or sometimes only one letters, they turn upside down the clean and seemingly well-controlled facade of an entire company.

Photo by Gina Gayle for the SF gate

BLF has several sets of presentations. They could have gone for the "terrorist" version but given the theme of the festival, they chose the "corporate" one.

First, we were given a tour of the Fundamentals of the organization, its clients and the opportunities.

They started their actions 30 years ago. At the time, there was no internet, no mobile phone, no blogs, etc. It was also a time when advertisement communication just went one way. Consumers received it and didn't have anyway to hit back through blogs or forums. There has been dozens of members over the years, some have gone, others have arrived more recently.

Client portfolio

In 77 a "bunch of freaks" in San Francisco called the San Francisco Suicide Club had vowed to live each day like it was the last one. 27 of them (including ten members wearing gorilla suits) were blindfolded and taken up to a roof. They were faced with two Max Factor billboard and some paint. Unfortunately they were a bit drunk, a bit conspicuous because of the gorilla suits and they started arguing about what should be done with the billboard. Some neighbour called the police and SF Suicide Club learned the message the hard way: be prepared, don't get drunk, don't wear stupid suits.

1980. Marlbore instead of Marlboro. It was the first time that the prank was interpreted as a real message from the tobacco company while in fact BLF wanted to comment on the lack of originality of the billboard.

1989. Kant, probably done by a student intern. "Actually it was probably a European intern as no one in the U.S. has ever heard of Kant."

1994. an ad for the the Hillsdale Mall. Very straighforward operation, all they had to do was turn a couple of lights off and just keep the central letters: LSD.

Only a few months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters ever to occur at sea which occured in Alaska in 1989, the BLF turned HITS HAPPEN -- NEW X-100 into SHIT HAPPENS -- NEW EXXON

Then they became more ambitious:

1997. Alteration of a Levi's billboard overlooking a major highway. BLF issued a press release in which they introduced Charles Manson, a figure who didn't need any introduction, as the new corporate spokesman of the jeans' company. This historic collaboration between two of most potent iconic forces of the 1960's taps into a frothy zeitgeist of manipulative nostalgia.

1996. Am I dead yet? Technically more elaborate as they had to sub-contract an electrician and a neon guy.

1989. The "Think Different" campaign of Apple became "Think desillusioned". The company had appropriated the image of famous dead guys or exiled ones like the Dalai Lama. Bulletins are the biggest and the most expensive.

The clients this time were technology companies, with a sector focus on the "dot-coms". Large-format warning labels were added to the billboards, in the style of a standard computer error message, bearing the bold copy: "FATAL ERROR - Invalid Stock Value Abort/Retry/Fail".
Ironically the stock market crashed right after this action.

A billboard manipulation can take from a few hours to a few weeks for the most ambitious actions.

Even before the improvement action takes place there is a careful preparation. The area surrounding the billboard is mapped, looking for the best ways of quick escape, ideal positions for ground crews, etc.

BLF has to go more and more tech-savvy, just like the industry does. Today you get talking billboards, talks of billboards in space, billboards activated by motion sensors, etc.

In 2005, they collaborated with artist Ron English for their first animatronic billboard alteration. The background is an original 12' x 22' painting by English. At the foreground the animatronic of Ronald McDonald feeding a fat kid his daily dose of Big Macs. The improvement took place in broad day light at a busy cross road in San Francisco while 15 persons where on the ground, dressed up like McDonald and acting crazy.

Some of the key rules of their billboard improvement actions:

- Make alterations that will make people smile not something that will make them angry,
- Less is more. The best improvements are those that require only to alter a single letter to change the whole meaning of the campaign.
- Expose what is hidden. Some advertisers are too shy about what they really mean, BLF will help them make their message clearer. Case in point: the 2005 improvement of Johnny Walker where "Drink responsibly" became "Drink yourself blind".

- Send the press some media releases to better disseminate the action. A modified billboard might remain only one hour in the street before it is removed but its traces remain forever online.
- Document your action with some Before and After images.
- A careful planning is essential: Don't get caught, don't get hurt. The larger the billboard, the higher you'll fall.
- Minimize property damage and respect the sign men. BLF make modification which are easy to remove and always leave some beer or liquor for the men who have to come and clean their "improvements."
- You don't have to be in San Francisco to make and see billboard improvements. Make yours with the help of BLF's The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement guide (PDF).

And just like Rev. Billy did in a local shopping center, BLF made their own billboard improvement in the streets of Ghent.

More images of their actions.

New and improved!
Boingboing tv has recently video documented BLF's latest adventures in the world of "subvertising."

It took me ages to come up with the second part of Urban Interface Berlin. The event ended a few days ago but i thought it would be worth waiting for some proper documentation of Exposure as the images i took of the installation are -to say the least- pathetic.

Exposure monochromatic posters looked like the covers of mainstream magazines, the bars closing a prison cell or thumb prints. Installed along a segment of a passageway, they could only be enjoyed at night.

When a pedestrian passed by the poster, a distance sensor, connected to a tele-objective camera, activates the flash of the camera, casting the person’s shadow momentarily on the poster. The poster's graphics being printed with fluorescent ink, shadows are captured and become an integrated element of the poster that gradually fades away. Simple, immediate and effective.

As Jussi Ängeslevä and Richard The explain, the technology is used by science museums around the world, and artists such as Random-International. The artists/designers combined the simple technological principle with traditional poster design, where static graphics are augmented with the viewer's silhouette to create playful situations and weave micro narratives for the unsuspecting public as they navigate through the dark alleys.

The work comments on the effects social softwares have on us. The online self-presentation being an idealisation of the reality, and only existing through the aid of the service providers. By reminding the traces and constraints the license terms levy upon us, Exposure brings the online discourse to physical space in the form of a poster series. The work is also a comment on the omnipresent cameraphone, a "little brother" who is relentlessly prying on the unexpected moment of embarrasment or shock. Exposure's motion sensing flash lights relate to this "everyman paparazzi".

Related: SonarMatica has a fantastic line-up of projects playing with shadow this year.
Previously: Tool's Life, Bugs, errors, and weird behaviors, Takashi's Seasons, Biophilia, Streetclock, Shadow, Visceral Cinema: Chien , Reflective stencils, etc.

Eduardo Fernandes, Flávio Reis, Geandre Tomazzoni, Gustavo Godoy, Frederico Ming, Maurício Brandão, Olavo Ekman, Rodrigo Araújo and Sandro Akel are the members of Bijari, a Brazilian collective of artists/activists whose portfolio is one of the most impressive i've ever seen. They work for commercial corporations without loosing their soul, freshness and identity, they are also well-known for their VJ activities and somehow they even find some time to invade cities with their critical and witty interventions that comment on contemporary urban issues.

Bijari is 10 years old this year. How did it all start and how did you grow over the years? Were you planning to cover so many areas (artistic urban interventions, web design, graphic design, video installations, etc.) right from the start?

The art collective was born in 1997, when we began to meet for common interests, research, chats, parties. Since 2001, we think about art with regard to the city, architecture and urbanism issues (most of us are graduates of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo). Through the extended field of art and the countless symbolical forms that it offers, we distinguish a very interesting way of developing considerations and criticisms about the metropolitan condition as well as about architecture, since we never have made architecture strictly speaking.

Diversity and elasticity always were our priorities, and we are constantly researching and linking diverse knowledge areas, in order to create more possibilities of transformation in our works as well as to extend the number of potential clients, something very inconstant in this market.

Bijari engages with many media and technologies. Does it mean that each member of the group has a specific role and its own competences? Or is each project always developed through a "total team" work?

Nowadays, we are an enterprise with nine partners, distributed over a horizontal structure in which we perform all productive and administrative functions. We participate and function as art directors on the commercial market (video, VJ, graphic design, web, scenery). At the same time, we have our own art project that gives us some independence as to the necessity of art-products commercialization (most of them aren’t "consumable" like a sculpture is, for instance, consumable at an art gallery). Thus, a lot of those works are more focused on the process than on the final products.

Among us, there are varied talents and, depending on the nature of the work and availability of each partner, we organize groups for each job. A job differs from other one and the group organizes itself according to this. Some works are made by all of us but other not.

Resistant Architecture was an artistic investigation of non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen in central Sao Paulo. Can you give us more details about these non official activities and architecture of excluded citizen. Which form do they take? What was the outcome of your artistic project?

The Arquitetura da (R)esistência project (there is there a play on words: resistance-existence) was conceived through a look on the non-official urban equipment and architecture of downtown São Paulo city. Analyzing clandestine and parallel inventions and constructions over and for the urban network, we have created devices that drive attention on the manifestations that we regarded as creative and resistant expressions in front of the restrictions of the official, controlling and standardizing city. Through them appear some design and desire for adaptation and resistance.

Their image expresses concepts of polyphony, multiplicity and organicity which are typical of Brazilian culture. Thus, we want to establish an inclusion of this present and non-official memory, allowing other looks stirring up reflections on this phenomenon and asserting the dissonant image that is typical of the real city.

Bijari also developed a very intriguing "Chicken Project". How exactly did the intervention use the volatile? How did people react to your action and what did the project reveal that you might not have
suspected?

Using a camera to register, we’ve inserted a chicken in a street refuge where hucksters and pedestrians fought against cars and buses. After that, we moved the chicken to the front of a famous shopping center in Faria Lima avenue. The chicken acted as a kind of thermometer that could reveal us differences among people that use the same space.

On the one hand, the chicken was the solution! Several people started to cluster and run after it. The gallinacean had become an object of fascination and provoked greed – an opportunity to take away, bring home and maybe eat! On the other hand, it was a problem! In another place, after the chicken had begun to move in front of the shopping center, pedestrians deviated, looked distrustful, somewhat astonished by its presence in the city. Some people deviated, other hesitated before crossing it. Little by little, we were surrounded: three keepers appeared after a watchman had reported the situation by radio. A minute after, there was a guard vehicle over the sidewalk. Some nervous men accosted us, demonstrating some fear because of the situation: there was a new element scratching and pecking at their ground.

We thought that we would have met with situations of resistance, or strangeness, but we never considered the presence of so many watchmen. This short story illustrates the approach of architecture Bijari is concerned about – the one that develops in spite of the ready space established by political wishes imposed from top to bottom. In fact, we understand architecture as a space under permanent construction, subject to participation and pressing inclusion.

Are there urban phenomena you see emerge whatever the country you are in due to gloablization trends? On the other hand, what are the urban characteristics of Sao Paulo (or Brazil) that are peculiar to the place?

The great metropolis is an excluding place. The perception change on the appropriation of space – and its consequent appropriation from those who live in it – is the goal of our work.

The constellation of global cities, where city chains influence and polarize other ones around it, configure homogeneous cities that acquire the same aspect, one becoming like the other. It’s impossible to recognize if we are in São Paulo or Hong Kong. Urban space becomes pasteurized, sterile. We loose local identity and design tramples the living body of the city. This trend is sold to us as the unique truth and the paradigm for progress and modernity.

By creating a resistance to the general movement of globalization, the city preserves its own characteristics and learns to say no to certain ready-made proposals for a new world. The city is a living body; architecture must be thought as the possibility of building a space that welcomes its manifestations and essential activities.

In the last four years, we conceived projects that question the functions of public place, revealing relations of power hidden in everyday settings. We did and do this by using artistic artifices that serve to crop and amplify some aspects of the city. In an inverted process of architecture that builds solid structures, we create almost ephemeral works that guide themselves by rupture of standards in each individual, allowing a reflection on the approached themes.

Bijari is also involved in a series of projects developed for the commercial corporate market. How do the purely artistic projects relate to "hired" ones? Do the commercial and the art works feed each other?

We produced commercial works for some enterprises. Working commercially allows us to get some financial income and, also, to support part of our artistic research with a certain level of independence.

We take advertising as a reference for us because of its brutal visual and communication power, although the sense used in our art projects are completely inverted. The knowledge as a tool in trade or advertising works helps us working formally better in the image construction.

Lastly, we use our knowledge in interventions, installations and urban performances for developing projects in Guerrilla Advertisement trend, non-standard media. In those works we try to convince clients to invest in pieces or happenings that privilege contents creation and new experiences that are not pure branding.

How do you feel about the advertising world finding inspiration in and using the tools and mechanisms of alternative culture as it is happening more and more in urban areas*?

I guess new media are appearing, people are more and more online, communication pulses and information flows are more opened, in several paths and from interlocutors different from official media.

There will always be moments in which market has devours art and uses it in order to create new products and esthetics that support themselves for generating behavior and consumption trends. This is a natural cycle, in which art also devours market and its esthetics, where all created things are transformed in new forms and purposes, acting as incentive and feeding artists’ reactions, their offsprings will in turn be devoured and absorbed by market and advertising.

It’s important that, among this, anything gets fixing and changing mind of the people to a more conscious present and active participation in this world. Our times are very dynamic; people must gain enough mobility to accompany its speed, and enough action that ensures that they don't become mere coadjuvant actors.

Any advice for young creatives who dream of setting up a group like yours?

It’s important to keep updated with what's going on in the world, references, researches, to be attentive to the senses and always present some critical sense imbued with pro-activity.

Working in group demands that we reconsider our egos, become tolerant, learn to listen, become very persevering and focus on long term goals.

How is the contemporary art scene in Sao Paulo? Could you name us a few artists who deserve to get more attention from the public?

Because we are a group of nine artists, it’s difficult to know on which each one is connected at this moment. But, generally, we have some common references and we can quote those in areas we act them.

Beginning from video universe, we admire works of video-makers as Michael Gondry (“Eternal Shine of a Mind without Remembrances� and videoclips for White-Strips and Chemical Brothers), Spike Jonze and Johan Soderberg (with his instigating charge sheet against global consumption “Surplus�).

From Brazil, we would quote the documentary-makers João Salles and Eduardo Coutinho that possess a very strong work associated to urban urgencies. Thinking on integration of video with multimedia, Joshua Davis and his crazy work developing systems for standards generation.

It’s to be remembered also the recently deceased Korean Nam June Paik, father of video-art and member of Fluxus group, that acted at 1960 and 70 decades proposing plays, actions, performances, concerts, demystifying art, bringing it closer to the dynamics of daily life. Mentioning a contemporaneous video-artist, the young Uruguayan Martin Sastre and his creative fantastic-realistic videos in which he performs as character of his paranoid stories (in one of them, he proposes that Lady Di isn’t dead and lives hidden in Uruguay).

Migrating to art works, more specifically those related to public space and possibilities of interaction non mediated nor controlled by conventional forms of communication (interest focus of our art nucleus), we can quote satirical aspects of work of English artist and graffiti-painter Bansky, the playful and new-tech of Graffiti Research Lab, the engagement and formal precision lend from mass-media expressed in Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer works, as well as social expression/liberation vehicles of the Polish Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Quoting some artists that work with this approach here in Brazil, we can mention works of Daniel Lima and Frente 3 de Fevereiro [February the 3rd Front], that mixes theater, music and art with an appeal for the black cause. The Integração-Sem-Posse [Integration-Without-Possession] project (on which we were involved), linked to social movements fighting for housing; Contra-Filé group searching short-circuits in media and solo works of Cildo Meireles, Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg, Rubens Mano, Marcelo Cidade and graffiti-painters Zezão and Orion, just quoting some of them...

In the VJ area, scene in which we many times act, we mention the japs of Glamoove (that have developed a powerful software for image mixing), improvisations on jingles by Eclectic Method (UK) and VJ Anyone (UK) with whom we are developing a project (see also w.roland.com/audiovisual).

Other generic references that have inspired us but aren’t directly related to our artistic making: Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his critic and acid look on contemporaneous metropolis, studies involving deleuzean concepts and psychoanalysis in the structuration of contemporaneous being by Suely Rolnik, the book Abusado [Bold] by Caco Barcellos on Rio de Janeiro city’s drug traffickers, the Canadian electronic music producer Richie Hawtin and the fanzine Sociedade Radioativa [Radioactive Society] drawn by cartoonist friends.

Thanks Flavio for having orchestrated the interview!

* cf. this article.

Andy Cameron is the Head of the Interactive Department at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre on communication located near Treviso, in an old villa wonderfully restored by Tadao Ando. Each year Fabrica invites young artists, photographers, designers, musicans, writers, interaction designers from all over the world to closely collaborate to "uncover the future." His role at Fabrica alone justifies an interview of Andy Cameron. But there's more to Cameron. He is also a founding member of the Hypermedia Reseach Centre at the University of Westminster in London. In 1994, he co-founded Antirom, a studio that investigated the nature of interactivity - how it operates as a language, what forms and figurations of rhetoric it makes available, and what novel structures of spectatorship it offers. The award-winning interactive agency worked for clients like Levi Strauss (more information about their Levi's kiosk and its interactive toys), but also as an arts collective, with productions and performances at, among others, Sonar in Barcelona and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. IN 1999, with two founding membes of Antirom, Andy Allenson and Joe Stephenson, he participated to the creation of studio Romandson Interactive Design in London.

Andy Cameron also edited one of the books which was most useful to me when i started investigating what interactive art and design could mean. The Art of Experimental Interaction Design is a great presentation of works by Ryota Kuwakubo, Antenna Design, Boutique Vizique, Ear Studio, ART+Com, Tmema, and other individuals or collectives whose works have left a mark on the interaction field.

I'd just advise that you browse through their website to get an idea of what they are doing at Fabrica. One of their latest projects i really liked was Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris, constructed out of industrial storage shelving and stacks of obsolete technologies from the 1980s – dial telephones, VHS tapes and old school ghetto blasters, recreated in perfect detail in flawless white ceramic. Like a place where old technologies go to die. Oh, yes! And please do waste some of your precious time on doodle.

In the center of all this obsolescence flickered an electronic screen, the only sign of life within the installation space, that showed a moving image sequence of hundreds and hundreds of ghostly faces, peering out of the window and trapped in a never ending video loop. These are the faces of passersby in the street who, by touching a sensor set into the window, have triggered a video camera to record a short sequence of themselves to add to the exhibition.

Home Entertainment at Colette in Paris

One of the goal of antirom which you founded in 1994 was to "explore interactivity and try to understand what made an interactive experience engaging." You admitted at the time that it was "a simple question but one that proved difficult to resolve." 12 years on, is the answer to that question any clearer?

It's one of those questions where the answer seems blindingly obvious from one perspective, and yet it's hard to work out what the answer actually means. The short version is that interactive experiences need to be playful to be successful - if you want people to use your stuff and keep using your stuff, make it playful. Play is the thing. Play is the basic drive behind interactivity - it's the big 'what if?' aspect that keeps a good interactive experience humming along.

So now everyone's talking about play. It reminds me of the 90s, how everybody used the word 'narrative' all the time - everything had to be narrative this and narrative that - but nobody really explained what it meant or why everything had to be narrative. Narrative is actually a very simple thing at one level - a format for telling stories - but it became this almost metaphysical quality, this magical, indispensable... something.

Now the buzz words are play, playfulness, ludic and so on. I find myself using these words all the time and hearing these words all the time and yet I'm not sure we really know what their implications are.

In one way play is like narrative - play is a simple, formal thing, a way of setting things up. It's a way of positioning your audience in front of something so they know how to deal with it. So too is narrative, even if the formal methods of narrative and play are pretty much the opposite of each other. They don't mix very well. They are like two sides of the same coin - play is a technique that helps people construct stories, and stories are a way for people to recount and give meaning to what happened when people played a particular game at a particular time together. But formally they are very very different and very hard to mix together.

I'm increasingly interested not so much in what play is, but in trying to work out what makes it good - what makes this toy, this game, this installation, better than others. Thinking of interaction design not in terms of novelty or innovation but rather looking at each piece critically, in terms of the values and meanings and pleasures it can offer us. Are there any great works of interactive art? Which are they? Why are they so good? These are the questions I'm interested in finding answers to at the moment.

Has the interaction design scene changed since you joined it?

It's changed and it hasn't changed. There's still the same crossover between commercial design and more experimental artistic design - people doing corporate websites in the morning and insane installations in the afternoon. I think this is a good thing and I hope it stays like this. You can read about this kind of crossover on your lovely website every day. There's lots of superficial, technological change, but I don't think this is as important as it seems. The fundamentals of good interaction design don't seem to change much.

People are more and more interested in connecting interaction design with everyday life, everyday play. I mean in not really starting with certain kinds of technology in mind, but starting with certain kinds of activity in mind. And finding that interaction design, or making up games, doesn't always need complex technology.

10x10 and Barcode Installation

How much has the reaction of the audience evolved over time? Are they used to interactivity now, is it more difficult to surprise and entertain them? Is their feedback different from place to place (more difficult to please in London than in Bologna for example?)

I haven't noticed it evolving. It used to be really hard to surprise and entertain people and it still is. That's not going to change.

There are some cultural differences but I guess they're kind of obvious. Ross Phillips, who used to work at Fabrica, and who now heads interactive at ShowStudio in London, made a wonderful project with me at Fabrica called Face - the installation lets people control a camera to record a few frames of themselves and add it to a kind of collaborative ever looping ever growing movie. It's really simple and very deep at the same time - a really rich piece of interaction design. We did it in a gallery in New York as well as Benetton store windows in Italy, Hong Kong and Istanbul. We did a version in Colette in Paris. Ross did the same thing in London - in Liberty's window just off Regent's Street - and London was the only place where women flashed their breasts for the camera. It's something to do with the way they booze it up in London. And the fact that English women never seem to feel the cold.

How do you think interaction design/art is to evolve over the next few years? Do you see new frontiers, new aspects to explore?

I think 'frontiers' is the wrong word. I think we have to get over the whole idea of exploring new territory and boldly going where no man has gone before... Maybe this is a personal thing, maybe I'm talking to myself here. The idea of being a pioneer is such a very compelling one. I remember at Antirom there was a real competitive energy around the idea of coming up with original stuff, being the first one to do this or that. I started thinking about all this seriously a few years ago when I met the great Myron Krueger at Ars Electronica. We talked about his work - (when you're with Myron you tend to talk about Myron and his work) - and I was completely knocked out by a) how important he is as an artist and b) how completely ignored he's been by the mainstream art world. Why isn't he in the permanent collection at the Tate, at MOMA? Why isn't he in the art history books? And what I think it comes down to is this relentless rhetoric of exploration, of discovery, of trailblazing and groundbreaking and being in the vanguard. When you look at someone like Myron Krueger and his life's work you get the feeling that he was so busy exploring new frontiers that he didn't really take the time to exploit the extraordinary interactive scenarios that he invented. You also get a sense of how easy it is for an unsympathetic critic to dismiss Myron's work as being that of a crank inventor rather than a serious artist. I suppose this is what the geek ghetto is for. I wrote about this last year in a piece called "Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art"*.

None of which answers your question. What I'd like to see happen is for interaction designers and artists to let go of the relentless search for the new and try and make work which is as good as work in any other medium. I suppose what I'm saying is I'd like to see interactive art and design grow up a little.

You edited "The Art of Experimental Interaction Design" in 2004. I've always been surprised by the fact that you chose to put two words like "art" and "design" together. I thought that the art and the design worlds didn't like to be mixed together. Did i miss something?

My idea was to try and cram as many buzzwords into the title as possible so that as many people as possible would buy it. Of course it didn't work like that - artists were put off by the word design and designers were put of by the word art and everyone else was put off by the word interaction which apparently is so passé. I've never really felt that art and design are so far apart - this implies a romantic notion of what art is and especially what an artist is. But the real reason for the title was a cunning marketing ploy and I can tell you it failed miserably.

Which exhibition space do you regard as ideal for your installations? The window of a trendy shop in Paris or a new media art festival? How about a museum?

Does Benetton gives you carte blanche? Can your projects for fabrica be as experiemental as you want? Or are there any limits you should respect?

You know what - I'm grateful for any chance to put the work we do in Fabrica out in the world. I really don't see a shop window as less of an opportunity than a new media arts festival or a gallery or a museum. They're different audiences and they have different problems and different advantages. The web too - some of the more interesting work done at Fabrica in the last few years has been online - I'm thinking of Juan Ospina's Flipbook or Jon Harris' 10x10 or the Hatemap project by Harun Alikadic which aggregates extremist websites in a fun-to-use Flash interface. And we've just done benettonplay.com which is an experimental games site for Benetton, and which I am very proud of - check out Hansi Raber's doodle toy to see what I mean. Although Fabrica is wholly owned by Benetton, they really do have a very light touch when it comes to setting limits. Which is actually incredibly smart of them.

Fabrica invites young creatives from all over the world to join its research centre. They stay a year or two. What is the plus side and the down side of having people come and go so regularly? Don't you feel that a more long-term collaboration would be better sometimes?

The plus side is that we get a constant turnover of some of the best new talent, under 25 years old, from across the world. Yes, it can be frustrating to lose people after a year or two, but actually it's not so clear cut - people go out and get on with their creative careers and at the same time maintain a continuing relationship with Fabrica and what's going on there. Fabrica is situated in the countryside outside Treviso - far from the bustling creative centres of the world - so we work hard to build and maintain relationships with ex-fabricanti and with other artists and designers.

You told me about your respect for Nicolas Bourriaud, one of the few critics who understand the use of performative and interactive techniques. How much does his thinking influence the works developed at the interaction unit of fabrica?

Bourriaud doesn't influence what we do but the way we think about what we have done. I'm ashamed to say I wasn't aware of his work until a couple of years ago when Angela Vettese, the critic and curator and head of a contemporary art centre in Venice, the Fondazione Bevilacqua, gave a lecture on relational art at Fabrica. She didn't talk about interactive art or art that uses computers per se, but what she said had incredible relevance for the issues of spectatorship and authorship and language that have concerned me for a long time - since Antirom and before. She referred quite a lot to Bourriaud's 'Relational Aesthetics'. I read the book and found that here was a critical theory - and a body of work - that was struggling with precisely those questions which we were struggling with - how to deal with the fact that the artwork is not made by the artist but by the audience? What is the aesthetic? How do you know if it is any good? How to deal with banality? How to let go? It seems to me that the work of artists like Rikrit Tiravanija or Liam Gillick provides a real opportunity for interactive artists to think about what they are trying to do with technology, but from a different perspective. A perspective which has absolutely nothing to do with technology.

It was also a kind of validation, which I know sounds a bit pathetic, but there it is. Not of any particular piece of work - I've no idea if Bourriaud likes or even knows about interactive computer based art, or media art - but of an approach to making art and a way of thinking about what art can be. I've long been perplexed by the ghettoisation of interactive art and Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics seemed to me to offer a way out of the ghetto. It offers a critical approach to interactive art which doesn't rely on technical novelty but on broader questions of audience and agency.

We'll see. A new Fabrica group show, curated by Silvia Marini, Ann Poochareon and myself, called "I've been waiting for you" which explores the links between relational art and interactive art, is opening at the Triad gallery in Seoul in November this year. And we're showing several relational/interactive pieces at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of a major exhibition of Fabrica art and design this October.

Can you name us 3 interactive works you find particularly interesting? Why?

The Composition Station by Andy Allenson with Joe Stephenson, at the Science Museum in London. The piece is a table with 4 touch screens embedded into it - each screen has a musical grid which lets you compose a simple repeating pattern of notes. The key thing is you can change the number of notes in your grid and let it slip away from the other grids. So you get these really interesting patterns emerging from the combination of simple numbers - a 3 against a 4, a 7 and an 11 for example will give an unbelievably complex sequence. Andy Allenson was inspired by his experience of playing in a Balinese Gambelan orchestra - but the piece also seems to owe something to the music of Steve Reich. The Composition Station lets you explore something really fundamental about time, numbers and music - it's a glorious piece, rich and hypnotic and fascinating. You can get a taste of it on the Rom:One CD-Rom, (Mac OS 9 version only)
And you can see more pictures at http://www.pickledonion.com/cs/index.htm

Marie Sester's Access, made at Eyebeam in New York in 2003 and shown at Ars Electronica in the same year, is a piece for public spaces in which a robotic spotlight tracks a person as they walk across an area. It's funny and scary at the same time - it's got this deliciously double edged quality to it. As Sester comments in her notes about the piece "beware. Some individuals may not like the idea of being under surveillance. beware. Some individuals may love the attention." It's a great example of how interactive work can be meaningful without making a statement - the work is concerned with issues of surveillance, but it's not making a statement about surveillance, rather it's staging a mise en scene of surveillance and doing it in a way which manages to be playful and profound at the same time. Photos of Access and videos.

And finally I'd have to include Videoplace created by Myron Krueger right back in the 1970s. He came up with the supremely elegant idea of having the spectator stand in front of a screen and a camera and seeing the image of themselves projected back onto the screen in real time. The result is a literal embodiment of the audience within the artwork where the body itself becomes the interface to kind of self portrait. It's a basic blueprint for some of the best interactive art created in the last decades - I'm thinking of work by artists like Scott Snibbe, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and many others. Videoplace helped us to recognize what Krueger called "a new category of beauty" in the world - an aesthetic which is properly interactive - and for this I am truly grateful to him.

Thanks Andy.

Catch up with Andy’s Interaction Unit at the Fabrica: Les Yeux Ouverts show at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, it opens October 6 until November 6. They have another piece at Triad in Seoul opening November 15 2006.

Interactive Fabrica promo poster found at Ann's place. Pictures of Fabrica's installations courtesy of Andy Cameron.

*Cameron, Andy. "Dinner with Myron Or: Rereading Artificial Reality 2: Reflections on Interface and Art". In aRt&D: Research and Development in Art, ed. Joke Brouwer et al. V2_NAi Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 90-5662-423-7.

UPDATE: i couldn't resist. As soon as i saw the image that Ann had blogged of the ten Antirom guys, i knew i had to post it as well. Congrats to Mister Roope for the lovely Hawaii t-shirt.

Another great vintage ad about personal hygiene.

Via Billboardom < eatliver.

Also: Blow in her face.