BirdWatching

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After studying visual communication in Munich (DE), Anette Lenz moved to Paris in 1990. There she worked with Alex Jordan in "Grapus", and was a co-founder of the design collective, "Nous Travaillons Ensemble". 1993 she started her own studio.
Between 1998 and 2001, she created visual communication of the Théâtre de Rungis, for which she received the Gold Medal in Corporate Design in Brno (CZ) in 2002, and an Honorary Mention in Lahti (SF) in 2003. Anette Lenz is a member of AGI since 1999.
For the posters created in association with Vincent Perrottet for the Théâtre d’Angoulême, they received the Silver-Medal in the International Poster Biennial Tehran in 2004 and the Grand Prix in the International Poster Biennial Ningbo, China in 2004, 3rd price in Toyama
She has worked for Radio France, Paris, since 2000. Her main working field are public and cultural institutions and Public space is important to her. She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).

Adless World

German insurance company showing how billboards can work in relation to their environment. Made by Dusseldorf agency Butter.

Large Buddhist painting from Buseoksa. 1684. Hanging scroll 925x577cm. Colour on silk. National Museum of Korea, Seoul.

Apparently these types of massive scrolls (9 meters high, more than 5.5 meters wide each) where hung from buildings and/or frame structures to act as backdrops to monastery outdoor events, to be seen from far way and retold stories by the use of symbolic imagery.

From the guide book:

This hanging scroll, painted for the monastery Buseoksa in 1684, depicts the central part Sakyamuni Buddha preaching the Lotus Sutra on Mt. Gridhrakuta. The Buddha is surrounded by his ten great disciples, bodhisattvas, sravakas (voice hearers), the four heavenly kings and vajra-bearers. In the upper part, a Buddha triad is shown preaching, with Vairocana in the middle, Bhaisaiyaguru in the left and Amitabha in the right. The two Buddhas in the left and right from another triad in combination below, as the Buddhas of the three realms.

Unfortunately this image is of very poor quality and doesn't come close to showing the grandeur of this piece, since you are allowed only non-flash, non-tripod photography inside the museum (understandable). Maybe you know of a better image of this scroll? Please do let me know. The one in the guide book is terribly cropped but I might insert it to show the great detailing.

Images courtesy of Wang Wei, Engkiat Tan and others

The architect Usman Haque made this project, The Burble, which was an installation performance of fantastic and magical proportions situated in the public space. It is very interesting in terms of how marketing works today and how it’s dictating the use of public space and leading the way to new initiatives in outdoor advertisement. It could perhaps be considered as a future replacement even, if the channels that we have today would disappear for some reason. The endorsement by brands of public events will, in my mind, become more frequent as public opinion changes and that in a way challenges brands to communicate more creatively as opposed to mainstreamed and conventional.

The way that this particular project was perceived and in extension how the public reacted to it, was in direct relation to the underlying marketing strategy by the commissioners, in this case an art event and a fashion event. The first time the event happened it was marketed as the opening of the Singapore Biennale, the second time it was the opening of the London Fashion week. The amount of brand exposure in these two cases was significantly different. In the Singaporean implementation of it, it was received as a public art event and the media picked up on it, giving them quite a lot of brand exposure in different media, ranging from art, architecture and even technology, so people flocked to this event, extending the brand value since it was seen to be hosting an inclusive big fun project. In London on the other hand, it was unfortunately renamed “The Moet Mirage” as part of the marketing strategy and this actually worked against them, since it was seen as an exclusive corporate event and in extension a pr stunt, so the media didn’t really pick it up in the same extent as in Singapore. Here is what the Times Lifestyle & Fashion commented on it and you can clearly tell its conventionality by being featured in the cryptic "Women" section. Even the reporter seems to think that it was a bad idea to rename it. You could off course argue that they where not only different brands, targeting a very different audience, but the fact remains that the free brand exposure in the media could have been much more extensive, had the fashion event commissioner been less conventional in their branding model and more inclusive and creative in their marketing. In the end, they could have really spun from the art event itself even and thus linked the brand with other disciplines, global audiences and media, further extending the values and getting loads of free exposure.

This pet billboard was made by Klein Dytham architecture. Absolutely beautiful.

The building is tiny. It’s a 11m long, two-storey high wedge, 2.5m wide at one end and tapering to just 600mm at the other. Although small, it has a prominent position facing a well-trafficked road. Being nearly all front, we let it be what it so obviously wanted to be – an inhabitable billboard.

A Guidebook on Pet Architecture explains:

They are areas such as a 1-meter width space among many closely placed buildings, a small and subdivided piece of land, or a long and slender city block sandwiched between the road and the railroad. These unusual places are the byproducts of urban development and have been produced abundantly in Tokyo. This undefined space has come into existence in the marginal realm between the different city systems, or it is immanent in the city system itself! They are small and though they appear, at first glance, to be somewhat cold and distant to the surrounding environment we can say that this type of architecture adopts the attributes of pet culture and have become pets of the city environment. They too are small, humorous and charming in their own way!

Standing in Times Square - Its 2006
Originally uploaded by .HS.

Places like Times Square and Picadilly Circus will in the future become experience museums, amusement theme parks. They are already that, someone just has to fence it and charge entry fee. Check this photo out:)

Welcome to Marlboro Country. Smoking when pregnant harms your baby.

British photographer Stephen Gill started making the truly beautiful Billboards series in 2004 , where he only depicts the structures behind them and the ad messages. This is not only a brilliant document of our times but the photographs are so immensely captivating in themselves, so detailed that they convey a sense of nudity while still reflecting humor and tenderness. Check here for the Design Observer review.

Image courtesy of youngdoo

Integrating messages on buildings will become a greater challenge for architects, designers and advertisers as public advertising mediums such as the billboard disappear. It gives way to new technology and production methods, but it’s proving difficult to merge the kind of consumer expected interaction we are used to from Web 2.0 in to more rigid architectural structures.

This in an attempt by ARUP and UN Studios to integrate LED technology in to the facade of a shopping mall. It is not really interactive but was awarded in 2005 by the IALD for its magical design:

Arup’s Rogier van der Heide has been accorded the most prestigious award for Lighting Design – the Radiance Award, given by the IALD (International Association of Lighting Designers.)

The award, bestowed by a panel of design peers, was given to Rogier in recognition of his contribution to lighting design, highlighting one of his most recent projects, the Galleria West Shopping Centre in Seoul. The judges described the project as ''State of the art technology and design... a striking effect... a vibrant and scenic experience at night''.

Together with Ben van Berkel of UN Studio in Amsterdam, Rogier and his team developed a lighting scheme for the building skin that changes, chameleon-like, at night, and during the day reflects the subtleties of natural light on the opalescent, dichroic glass discs facade. At night, the discs are individually backlit and controlled by a computer program to create brilliant colour schemes all over the building - each disc acting like a big pixel on a giant screen feeding text or images around the entire external structure. More...

I believe the main problem with interaction is the perceived authorship. Unless architects, planners and commissioners are getting keen on giving away their authorship in favor of true interaction, it will never reach the level of interaction that we see in other digital media. There seems to be the old perception that if you give someone the opportunity to speak freely or have their voice heard, then they will undoubtedly express something inappropriate (or even unethical). This could be compared to the situation of the WWW in its early days. I remember in the nineties when it truly started to spread to the general public, the media reporting on worst-case scenarios and raising concerns about the availability of information. There where actually people claiming that they didn’t want this technology in the home because of the intrusion they felt from inappropriate material. There was this belief that as soon as you turn on your computer, immoral content would come flashing at you and you wouldn’t be able to stop it and you would be corrupted. (Thank god for pop-up blocking) The idea back then was that if any type of information was easily accessible to anyone, then we would have total anarchy. Because deep down we are all a bunch of bomb-building perverted sociopaths out to destroy civilisation as we know it? Fifteen years later and the technology is mostly used for…yeah, you guessed it. To slag other people of.

Clerkenwell billboard was white as a sheet last night in the cold. View more images on the Outdoor flickr stream.

IMG_6896, originally uploaded by Tony de Marco.

The city that "cleaned up it's act" by passing a law that banned all public advertising (Cidade Limpa). And the mayor is no leftist revolutionary! It will be interesting to follow up on this and see how it develops.

On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America's largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.

The ban on what the mayor calls "visual pollution" was the culmination of a long battle between the city's politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil's economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past. More...

Apparently Mr. Kassab (the mayor of Sao Paulo) is planning to introduce more street furniture with advertising in the future.

A third generation billboard painter speaks about his dying profession.

It takes him about a day and a half to paint a billboard, about a half day longer than it used to. Most of his joints now ache from the work, he said. "I have no fear of heights and it's very relaxing up there," he said. "And it's art."

No surprise, heckling comes with roadside work.

"It's crooked, or you missed a spot," Dickinson said are common shouts from passing motorists. "I've been hearing it for 25 years."

The concept of placing a poster on a structure especially designed for it, rather than simply pasting it on a fence or the side of a building, had been the goal of industry leaders since 1871. This single development, while seemingly modest, was necessary in the effort to make the billboard a medium with an identifiable framework. The standardized structure allowed the advertisement to be replaced in the landscape or cityscape with a certain authority as a medium; this authority was not lost on existing –as well as potential- clients.

Page 14 The American Billboard: 100 years/ by James Fraser

This book tells the story of the public notice, a precursor to the modern day billboard.

Summoned by drum or trumpet to the market-place, the people saw the actual document unrolled – directly, presumably, from the actual hand of majesty – and heard its oracular pronouncement. With the reading done, and the text duly posted, they gathered round to see the document. It was almost as though the monarch himself had come among them.

Page 8 The Public Notice – an illustrated history / by Maurice Rickards

First things first. Here is the article billboard on Wikipedia. It's a good introduction but unfortunately very limited to the US market. Let's see if we can change that.

This is the Post Title

Adless World

A Powerful Medium

The site-specific

Buddhist Billboard

The magical outdoors

My pet billboard

The theme park

Billboards as art

Digital messages on buildings

White as a sheet

A visual polluter

A dying art

The birth of a medium

The public notice

Wiki - Billboard

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