Steve Lambert

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Yearly Archives: 2008

Add-Art

Add-Art: Art replaces ads

Work, , , , ,

Add-Art replaces online ads with art

Add-Art is a Firefox addon that replaces website advertising with art. Created with support from Eyebeam and Rhizome, Add-Art releases new art shows every two weeks and strives to feature contemporary artists and curators.

The plugin works alongside AdBlock Plus, which blocks online ads, and simply replaces that blank space with art images. AdBlock Plus is the most popular of the thousands of available add-ons for Firefox with 18 million total downloads (as of May 2008) and over 250,000 downloads per week.

For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. AddArt attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads – it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit the New York Times online or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by a young contemporary artist.

The project is supported by add-art.org which provides information on the current artists and curator along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators.

Images need to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. One group of images is shown per page. The curatorial duty is passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the Add-Art site.

With the overwhelming popularity of adblockers, if Add-Art were to attract 5% of existing users, the numbers would be in the hundreds of thousands. Add-Art can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace – all over the world.

Would you like to see art instead of ads as you browse sites online? Go to add-art.org and download the plugin for your Firefox browser now.

Completed with the help of opensource developers including:

Add-Art intro video

steve lambert

Add-Art: New Museum May 22nd

News, Talks

As part of the release of Add-Art, I will be on a panel with other Rhizome Commission winners, Evan Roth (of Graffiti Research Lab) and Ben Engebreth, eteam, and Rafael Rozendaal.

Add-Art is the web browser plugin that replaces advertising on the web with art from a curated database. I have been working on with a team of volunteer open-source developers off and on for the past year. As with most open-source projects it’s a work in progress — for example you’ll notice the site is rather plain — but we’re preparing for a more public announcement Friday.

Rhizome Commissions 08
Conversation with eteam, Steve Lambert, Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, and Rafael Rozendaal

$6 members, $8 general public

The Rhizome Commissions Program was founded in 2001 to provide support to emerging artists working with new technologies. The forty-four works commissioned to date represent some of the most innovative, pioneering efforts in the field. Tonight, artists eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), Steve Lambert, Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, and Rafael Rozendaal, who received support in the 2008 cycle, present their finished projects as well as other select projects. Additional Rhizome Commissions will be presented in August and October.

2008 Commissioned projects:

http://www.rhizome.org/commissions/2008/

Black Market Type and Print Shop

Exhibitions, News, ,

see my Black Market Posters from the show.

23 MAI — 22 JUIN 2008
THE BLACK MARKET TYPE & PRINT SHOP
Commissaire: JOSEPH DEL PESCO (San Francisco)

Discussion/table ronde : samedi 31 mai à 15h
Vernissage : samedi 31 mai à 17h

With posters by: A Constructed World, Brad Adkins, Amy Balkin, Paul Butler, Harrell Fletcher, Amy Franceschini, Jaime Gili, Sam Gould, Marc Horowitz, Marisa Jahn, Steve Lambert, New Beginnings, Giancarlo Norese, Derek Sullivan and window display by Jeff Ramsey

articule’s annual curatorial project The Black Market Type & Print Shop, organized by curator Joseph del Pesco, presents typography as a vehicle for the dissemination of art. The project involves an extensive archive, based on appropriated type samples culled from exhibition catalogues and artist publications. About twenty fonts have been created without the permission of the artists, and their use is limited to the exhibition. Picking up on the groundwork laid by appropriation art in the Eighties, these types are a byproduct of art production extracted for a second use, but without modification or addition. With an interest in functionalizing contemporary art history, del Pesco seeks to encourage the transmission of cultural production by embedding its histories in distributed media.

The types are appropriated from: Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, R. Crumb, Julie Doucet, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Dzama, General Idea, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chris Johanson, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Margaret Kilgallen, Duane Michals, Chris Ofili, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, Dieter Roth and David Shrigley.

Following the completion of the archive, a group of 15 international artists were invited to create a text-only poster using the fonts to be distributed around Montreal. Furthermore, articule’s space will be transformed into a full production environment with a computer and a photocopy machine. With the help of an in-house technician and graphic designer, visitors will be able to utilize the typefaces assembled in the archive to design and print their own posters in the gallery. The effect of which is a distribution of the aesthetics of contemporary art into the media stream of lost-dog announcements, rock show flyers, for-sale notices and other street-post ephemera. In this way The Black Market Type & Print Shop proposes an unusual inhabitation of preexisting modes of communication, mass production and distribution.

The Black Market Type & Print Shop is part of the 2008 edition of Viva! Art Action which focuses on, and celebrates performative and alternative practices that characterize the spring programming of La Centrale, Clark, DARE-DARE, Praxis, Skol and articule under the theme Performance, Activism and Everyday Life. http://www.vivamontreal.org

Ray Johnson title type
Title Type by Ray Johnson

Gelf Magazine: I’m Hating It

News, Press

Guerrilla artist Steve Lambert declares war on advertising.
Adam Rosen

In one of the greatest Simpsons episodes ever–yes, I said it–the town of Springfield finds itself literally besieged by an army of advertising character-zombies. The marauders in “Attack of the 50-foot Eyesores” are but barely disguised caricatures of formerly ubiquitous ad mascots (the Big Boy from Bob’s Big Boy becomes “Lard Lad;” the Pep Boys, “Zip Boys”). As the walking, anthropomorphic product pitches close in, Lisa finally figures out that the way to defeat them is for the townsfolk to turn their backs on the monsters and refuse to look at them. Lard Lad, along with all of the other boardroom-created Frankensteins, ultimately suffocates from lack of attention.

Despite the scarcity of Bob’s Big Boy and Pep Boys in the modern retail landscape, it’d be wrong to dismiss this episode–a sketch in 1995’s installment of the annual “Treehouse of Horror” special–as dated. In place of the aforementioned icons, just insert a sassy, Cockney-accented reptile or a giant, yellow smiley face. We’ve failed to heed the parable of Lard Lad.

Steve Lambert is trying his damnedest to make us look away. A guerrilla artist and senior fellow at the Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, a cutting-edge art collective in Chelsea, Lambert is also the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, a group whose mission is to “co-opt the tools and structures used by the advertising and public relations industries…to call into question the purpose and effects of advertising in public space.”

read the rest here

NPR: Dialog over Public Advertising Gets Sticky

News, Press,

I did a short segment live on National Public Radio today for their Bryant Park Project morning show. You can stream the segment online from NPR’s site.

The segment was about the Anti-Advertising Agency “You Don’t Need It” sticker, which I did with Packard Jennings after our Bus Stop Bench project. The stickers were picked up by Gawker recently, then MSNBC, MakeZine, and a few other sites. It’s been a hectic week…

UPDATE: You can now listen to this as an MP3 right here!
[audio:http://visitsteve.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/steve-lambert-on-bryant-park-project.mp3]
download:
steve-lambert-on-bryant-park-project

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