Introduction
The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-heldThe Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. An instrument of conversion and reclamation, The Artvertiser situates the 'read-only', proprietary imagery of our public spaces as a 'read-write' platform for the presentation of non-proprietary, critically engaging content.
Product Re-Placement
The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual 'canvas' on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device.After training, when ever the advertisement is exposed to the device, the chosen art will appear instead. It doesn't matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.
If an internet connection is present at the site, the substitution can be immediately documented and published in on line galleries such as Flickr and YouTube, providing an alternative memory of the city.
While offering itself as a new platform for public art, The Artvertiser seeks to highlight the contradiction of Public Space in the context of what can and cannot be written on the surface of our cities.
By leveraging the internet as a redistribution mechanism, The Artvertiser supposes that an urban site dense with proprietary imagery can be re-purposed as an exhibition space for art and archived as such in turn. Similarly, on-site exhibitions can be held whereby pedestrians are invited to use the looking device to view an exhibition on the buildings around them.
Finally, non-live video can also be used. This enables artists to 'product replace' advertisements in film and video with alternative content and redistribute those movies with friends or using their favourite peer to peer network.
A third method of interception has been theorised by Julian and Danja Vasiliev, involving realtime Man-In-The-Middle attacks on a wireless computer network and subsequent alteration of streaming video. This will be developed at some point soon.
The Artvertiser has received development funding from Intermediae.
Team
Project leader: JulianComputer programming: Julian and Damian
Binoculars V-1: Julian, Clara and Diego
Exhibition designs: all of us
Progress
The software is stable, working well and will soon be ready for distribution. Currently it runs only on The Artvertiser's own digital binoculars and netbooks/laptops with webcams. We're still working on a port for Android.The Artvertiser targets three classes of device:
A set of urban and weather-proof digital binoculars have been built. This device guarantees high-quality immersive advertisement substitution and is be more performant for AR applications than any hand-held device currently available; equipped with a high-quality wide-angle lens, fast CPU and GPU, powerful wireless adaptor, long battery life and plenty of solid state storage space.
A page of concept art by Julian can be seen here.
We are currently porting the software to Google's Android OS, now used on many smartphones worldwide. Following this we will target the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) and (perhaps) the iPhone. These devices will have support for video and photo substitution modes at low resolutions. We hope to have an Android port available soon.
The great bulk of the world's camera phones run the Symbian OS. We are currently authoring a version of The Artvertiser to provide 'single shot' photo substitution.
The code
The Artvertiser is a free software project and has been released under the copyright terms of the General Public License v3.0. There will be tangible consequences for those that use this code without abiding the terms of the above license. Alot of work has gone into this project: we will take GPL violations very seriously!The entire project tree exists as a git repository, cloned like so to your local system:
git clone git://repo.or.cz/The-Artvertiser.git
The code should currently build on any modern Linux-based OS with the addition of a couple of dependencies and - thanks to Damian - should also compile on OS X with the correct prior tweaks in place. See the README file in the top-level directory for more information.
A special 'mob' user has been set up allowing complete Read/Write access for anyone at all. Once you've cloned the repository as above, just:
git checkout mob
.. to move to the mob branch. It's all yours!
Videos
Artvertising Berlin, Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.
Julian Oliver - TEDxRotterdam 2010 from TEDxRotterdam on Vimeo.
Old videos:
Booking information
Get in contact if you'd like the Artvertiser at an event in your city.Conceptual References
They Live, directed by John Carpenter, 1988, imagines an Earth overrun by aliens that control citizens using subconscious instructions encoded into billboards. The dystopia is revealed to the hero when he stumbles across what appears to be a simple pair of sunglasses.Product Placement, WikiPedia article.
Diminished Reality was a conceptual project by Steve Mann and James Fung that explored re-purposing billboard advertisments as the basis of a messaging and navigation system using Augmented Reality technology. While the experiments were largely non-realtime and not actually experienced in the street, the project represents an important early exploration into 'product-replacement' using computer vision.
