Jeff Crouse’s Unlogo was recently featured as part of the 01SJ Biennial in a collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Net Art program. As Richard Rinehart writes in his essay about the project

“Corporate branding coupled with new media transforms our already cluttered visual environment into a pulsing tesseract of capital. Commercial television and video digitally blur some logos while promoting others. Music videos were introduced as short films and commercials for albums, but today’s music videos are commercials within commercials (Lady Gaga’s music video Telephone features nine product placements.) However, new media also offer new forms of resistance and play.”–Richard Rinehart, Digital Media Director and Adjunct Curator, BAM/PFA

Crouse’s Unlogo

“is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on.”–Unlogo website

bimbos, San Francisco

Definitely humorous – for a $100 contribution to Crouse’s Kickstarter campaign, he will personally take your favorite movie and use “The Moustachizer” to add moustaches to everyone in the movie. – Unlogo also raises serious issues about how the increasing commercialization and privatization of contemporary society plays out in an increasingly hybrid public space, where all your vacation photos and videos posted to Facebook (or wherever) also become augmented megaphones for the brands and logos in those “memories.”

Join me in supporting Jeff’s Kickstarter campaign for Unlogo.

P.S. Among other sources, let’s not forget Steve Mann’s Eyetap precedent-

“Dr. Mann fights technology with technology, wearing computers on his body and cameras in his glasses so he can ”shoot back” by recording everything he sees. The billboards and advertisements posted on every public surface are a form of ”attention theft,” he says, so he has invented technology that replaces these messages with whatever he would like to see. When he is wearing his ”eyetap” glasses, which project an image onto the retina of his eye, a condom ad in a bathroom becomes a picture of a waterfall.”–New York Times

The rise of artists engaging in corporate endeavors continues to give me pause as I read about Jeff Koons designing the next BMW Art Car.

And the fact that Bono piped in to state that this partnership would help the world “fall in love with automobiles again”????

Hmmmmm.

“Just after the opening of my solo show at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles we loaded up a rented pick-up truck with the arrow sign I included in the show. When I came across various locations in the city, we untied the sign, carried it over and snapped some shots – each time improvising a message for the face.”

via Steve Lambert

Sometimes there may be only art, sometimes there may be only advertising, and sometimes one of each.

This game is inspired by the growing merger of aesthetics and commerce. As I realize that I am a targeted demographic for commercials using re-edited Roxy Music songs and Target ads that remind me of last years gallery shows, I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable. Is this is a mutually beneficial relationship for all involved? Is it bad to be inundated with higher level design and conceptual imagery on our billboards and buses even if its for corporate gain? What impact can public art projects have in taking over public spaces if their audiences can’t tell the difference between art and advertising? I can’t help but feel co-opted but maybe its just aesthetic evolution?

“Answers” will be listed in the comment section of this post next week.