Welcome to the city of the future; a mixture of chrome, glass and concrete, illuminated by the glow of giant TV screens pumping out corporate messages; the streets are patrolled and sanitised by ‘community wardens’ and homeless people and other undesirables are removed to promote the squeaky-clean atmosphere of shopping and ‘city living’. Sounds like the nightmare future of Bladerunner but it’s a vision Manchester is increasingly fulfilling. Sanitised and advertised for the yuppies and the shoppers, it’s time to redecorate the city!
Most of the time our surroundings and behaviour are dictated by others; advertisers, the council, the police. But we can create our own environment and open up the city to new ways of living.

Subvertising
I really hate adverts. They prey on your insecurity to sell you stuff you don’t need or want.
As Bill Hicks once said, ‘If any of you work in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No seriously. Kill yourself.’

Advertising is a sick profession; finding ways to manipulate and exploit your weaknesses to sell you crap you neither need nor want. It’s everywhere these days and in the form of billboards highly vulnerable to alteration. Subvertising billboards can be great, simultaneously creative and subversive.
Find billboards that make you really pissed off; racist, sexist or just plain daft, anything that would look better altered. Add your own slogan, amend theirs, cover logos, whatever takes your fancy.
You can use a spray paint or paper. Just print out what you want from a computer and blow up to A3 using a photocopier (printer ink will run in the rain) and apply using wallpaper paste. When you are doing it you might want to wear ‘workmen-like’ clothes to blend in and sometimes daylight can be more inconspicuous than at night. Technically it is vandalism, but I know very few people who have been arrested.
www.uhc-collective.org.uk, www.subvertise.org, www.billboardliberation.com

Stencils
Post your message on the side of any wall. For a simple one colour stencil you need to create a black and white image. you can do this on a pc or by drawing onto paper. Remember the ‘black’ (the bit you will cut out) of the image needs to be integral so that when you cut it bits of cardboard don’t just fall off. You can remedy this by creating ‘bridges’ of white within the black. It’s better to have blockier designs because details tend to warp after spraying. For text you might want to use a stencil font to aid you. When you have your black and white image glue it onto a piece of card, not too thick, not too thin - a cereal packet often suffices. Cut the black area out with a craft knife. When you spray use minimal amounts of matte paint as drips often form and the card warps. Take care when spraying, don’t carry stencils around in full view, avoid CCTV and think about having a mate act as a look out.
www.banksy.co.uk or loads of websites for inspiration

other stuff...

Graffiti
If you have the talent use it, if not practice at home first please. There are plenty of websites and zines around and if you wanted to see how amazing a city could look then visit Barcelona.
Stickers
A cheap set of stickers can be printed onto using a PC, drawn by hand or using a stencil. Check out industrial size stickers or visit your local post office for recorded delivery labels.

Radical art projects

www.uhc-collective.org.uk
Galleries on street art and subvertising. UHC also curate political art exhibitions and stage art interventions around the city.
www.stuffit.org
Culture Jam sandwiches for active consumption’ - Brummie site well worth checking for stickers, stencils etc
Mute magazine
www.metamute.com
Magazine which discuss the interrelationship of art and new technologies and their impact on culture, politics and globalisation.
www.randomartists.org
Cool group of artists in London who set up Temporary Autonomous Art zones - squatted buildings - where they exhibit their work outside the mainstream art world without the need for funding or sponsorship.

Spectacular times
Situationalism suggests that modern consumerist society is merely a spectacle that we view rather than particpate in. Situationalists (or weirdoes as they are also known) believe that by breaking the spectacle we can free ourselves from it and its control.
Here are some ideas on smashing the spectacle...

nATo
www.beyondtv.org/nato
A Manchester organisation, bringing together artists working on cultural, social and political issues. Associated with street art and street theatre they stage ironic ‘Marches for Capitalism’ dressed as businessmen holding ‘Fuck the Poor’ placards.

ReTag
www.howandwhy.org
Faced with a rising tide of corporate logos those ingenious fellows at Re>Tag have come up with a solution. Recycle and return to sender. In other words carefully craft a stencil of a corporate logo and spray it onto their shop front or office. Thus the logo is returned and the corporation faced with paying to remove its own image.
See also: Whirl-Mart; an anti-shopping ritual in which a troupe gathers and silently pushes empty shopping carts through the aisles of a local superstore. The point is not to outright protest the emptiness of material consumption, but to call attention to it through an absurdist mirroring of the shopping process.

Buy Nothing day/Steal something day
(depending on ideological perspective)
This day gives us the opportunity to peel back the veneer of respectability on consumerism. Past actions have included mass subvertising of billboards, aliens wandering through the Arndale and a shoplifting gang of Santa Clauses. The last Saturday of November. See www.adbusters.org for BND details.

the vacuum cleaner
www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk
When these guys go into shops with vacuum cleaners and start cleaning up after capitalism, madness ensues.

space hijackers
www.spacehijackers.co.uk
Reclaiming space and destroying hierarchy. Projects include a mobile street disco and holding a party on a train on the Circle Line.

More craziness:
www.breathingplanet.net
www.revbilly.com - sermons from the church of stop shopping
Death to the cult of celebrity!