Stereograph# React!Copyright 2009

Published by Actar.Roca i Batlle 208023 BARCELONA+34 93 417 49 93www.actar.es

All rights reserved. No part of this publicationmay be reproduced, stored in any retrievalsystem or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording otherwise, without permissionof the copyright holder.

ISBN 978 84 96774 77 3Printing: Dami Editorial & printing Services

1/Culture jammingPeter fussAlezandre OrionJorge FernandezRoadsworthWooter on a spring

2/Political artCraig fosterShepard FaireyStudents for a free tibet

3/Public interventionsReplaced street signsWish you where here

4/Mapping your realityBio MappingHeath Bunting

5/Urban typosPixaçaoEvan Roth

6/ArtivismTagueTinkin

7/HacktivismAdd-artSkullphoneZthoven

8/CraftivismAfghani Battle carpetsKnitta

PETER

FUSS4

Peter Fuss reclaims billboards to examine and evaluate present, socially taboo subjects. He’s been a fugitive, a critic, and many other things.

Hailing from Brazil, Alexandre sees his art work as a way of getting an environmental message across to those who ordinarily wouldn’t listen. A few years ago he adorned a transport tunnel in Sao Paolo with a mural consisting of a series of skulls to remind drivers of the detrimental impact their emissions have on the planet.

Culture jamming/Peter Fuss

Peter was generous enough to lend us a few minutes for an interview, after putting in some hard work on his latest project - a re-imagination of the Catholic Stations of the Cross, which forces one to think twice about perceptions of criminality.

Groundswell Collective: For our readers who aren’t as familiar with your background, can you give us a brief rundown of your life up until today?

Peter Fuss: I did many different things, many of them not even worth mentioning. Now I mainly paint. I am most known for works in acrylic paint on paper which I then illegally place in urban landscape. To do that, I use billboards which are plentiful on the streets.GC: When painting or designing an installation, do you start by thinking about the social issue first, or do you put design

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Culture jamming/Peter Fuss

by James David (Groundswell Talks)

PETER

FUSS

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ALEXANDRE

ORION16

Skulls in Sao Paolo

Hailing from Brazil, Alexandre sees his art work as a way of getting an environ-mental message across to those who ordinarily wouldn’t listen. A few years ago he adorned a transport tunnel in Sao Paolo with a mural consisting of a series of skulls to remind drivers of the detrimental impact their emissions have on the planet.

The Brazilian authorities were incensed but couldn’t actually charge him with anything so they instead cleaned the tunnel. At first the cleaned only the parts Alexandre had cleared but after the artist switched to the opposite wall they had to clean that too. In the end, the au-thorities decided to wash every tunnel in the city, missing the irony completely, it seems.

culture jamming/Alexandre Orion

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Reverse Graffiti

In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it’s for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.” David Suzuki.

Welcome to the world of reverse graffiti, where the artist’s weapons are cleaning materials and where the enemy is the elements: wind, rain, pollution and decay. It’s an art form that removes dust or dirt rather than adding paint. Some find it intriguing, beguiling, beautiful and imaginative, whereas others look upon it in much the same way as traditional graffiti – a complete lack of respect for the law. Reverse graffiti challenges ideals and perceptions while at the same time shapes and changes the environment in which we live, whether people think for the better, or not.

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View Orion’s work

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JORGE

RODRIGUEZ

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culture jamming/Jorge Rodriguez

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For some time, Andy Warhol has conceded to us 15 minutes of fame. That being the case, the prerequisite was to have an accident, be poisoned…That tricky media worthy relevance would not spare Marilyn, Elvis or Mao. Their faces were sufficiently important to be worthy of being remembered, reworked and converted into a treasured object or icon for posterity.

Why is one life more important than another? Most Importantly, who is interested that we think this way?

Jorge Rodriguez Gerada started making art more that 15 years ago in New York City (he is a Cuban New Yorker, and that is not banal biographical information added to satisfy the curiosity of curators in search for the exotic or art professionals whose value scale is

based on the passport).We are before one of the founders of the artistic direction known as “Culture Jamming”.

But lets go to the artistic processes of the Identity series, one of the best examples of coherence in art in the last few years. Portraits in charcoal (gestures, sketches? – not in the least) people, until now anonymous, scale the walls of buildings in our cities, in a format that we can begin to describe as gigantic. Yes, they are gigantically defying, proud, dignified. More social than political, with the measure that the preoccupation for one ridicules the other.

Jorge finds his protagonists in the street, in the neighborhood where they live, where they are from or decided to stay. That they be residents is important. They are not

an object troubé. Thus begins the true dialog. Mutual understanding, the reasons and the explinations. Then comes the final decision, which belongs to the local resident, to allow the work to be completed. But let us not be mistaken, the art piece is not the charcoal drawing. The artistic process begins with the search for the city, the building, and most importantly the person (who is sufficiently valiant to allow being found). Decide to be converted into a hero (like those of modernity described and defended by Baudelaire) monumental; a Goliath confronting the powerful King Davids of politics and advertising in order to take back the public space, snatched from our hands by advertisers anxious to sell us perfect men and women, and politicians that against all the evidence want to convince us that they are perfect.

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ROADSWORTH36

Roadsworth began painting the streets of Montreal in the fall of 2001. Initially mo-tivated by a desire for more bike paths in the city and a questioning of “car culture” in general, he continued to develop a lan-guage around street markings and other elements of the urban landscape using a primarily stencil based technique. In the fall of 2004, Roadsworth was arrested for his nocturnal activities and charged with 53 counts of mischief.

Despite the threat of heavy fines and a criminal record he received a relatively lenient sentence which he attributes in part to the public support he received subsequent to his arrest. Since that time, Roadsworth has received various com-missions for his work and continues to be active in both visual art and music.

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The grey area between graffiti and vandalism is more than theoretical for Roadsworth: his controversial street images have turned pavement into

ROADSWORTH

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WOOSTERON SPRING

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The outside walls of 11 Spring St. have been a public canvas for local and visiting street artists for two decades. Recently the building was purchased by developers Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias who will be turning the space into condos. Realizing they had purchased a public gallery, and also because they admired the constantly changing walls, they wanted to give the work a final farewell.

culture jamming/Wooster on spring

For some time, Andy Warhol has conceded to us 15 minutes of fame. That being the case, the prerequisite was to have an accident, be poisoned…That tricky media worthy relevance would not spare Marilyn, Elvis or Mao. Their faces were sufficiently important to be worthy of being remembered, reworked and converted into a treasured object or icon for posterity.

Why is one life more important than another? Most Importantly, who is interested that we think this way?

Jorge Rodriguez Gerada started making art more that 15 years ago in New York City (he is a Cuban New Yorker, and that is not banal biographical information added to satisfy the curiosity of curators in search for the exotic or art professionals whose value scale is

based on the passport).We are before one of the founders of the artistic direction known as “Culture Jamming”.

But lets go to the artistic processes of the Identity series, one of the best examples of coherence in art in the last few years. Portraits in charcoal (gestures, sketches? – not in the least) people, until now anonymous, scale the walls of buildings in our cities, in a format that we can begin to describe as gigantic. Yes, they are gigantically defying, proud, dignified. More social than political, with the measure that the preoccupation for one ridicules the other.

Jorge finds his protagonists in the street, in the neighborhood where they live, where they are from or decided to stay. That they be residents is important. They are not

an object troubé. Thus begins the true dialog. Mutual understanding, the reasons and the explinations. Then comes the final decision, which belongs to the local resident, to allow the work to be completed. But let us not be mistaken, the art piece is not the charcoal drawing. The artistic process begins with the search for the city, the building, and most importantly the person (who is sufficiently valiant to allow being found). Decide to be converted into a hero (like those of modernity described and defended by Baudelaire) monumental; a Goliath confronting the powerful King Davids of politics and advertising in order to take back the public space, snatched from our hands by advertisers anxious to sell us perfect men and women, and politicians that against all the evidence want to convince us that they are perfect.

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wosster began painting the streets of Montreal in the fall of 2001. Initially mo-tivated by a desire for more bike paths in the city and a questioning of “car culture” in general, he continued to develop a lan-guage around street markings and other elements of the urban landscape using a primarily stencil based technique. In the fall of 2004, Roadsworth was arrested for his nocturnal activities and charged with 53 counts of mischief.

Despite the threat of heavy fines and a criminal record he received a relatively lenient sentence which he attributes in part to the public support he received subsequent to his arrest. Since that time, Roadsworth has received various com-missions for his work and continues to be active in both visual art and music.

View Wooster’s work

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Stereograph is conceived as a magazine about graphic design and visual communication with a thematic approach to information rather than a merely cumulative treatment; in other words, the intention is for each issue to be devoted to a specific theme, which will be developed in a range of materials and formats: graphic projects, articles, essays and so on. The idea is to translate the concept we pioneered with Verb, our architecture magazine, to the world of graphics. This model of book-magazine has worked very well in the field of architecture, both as a tool with which we can research and experiment, and in terms of the commercial success it has achieved.