Introduction
The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art. The project was initiated by artist and developer Julian Oliver in February 2008 and is being developed in collaboration with artists Clara Boj and Diego Diaz.The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.
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, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. 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.
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. Neither graffiti or Fine Art, The
Artvertiser exploits the inevitable redistribution of these surfaces in media such as digital film
and photography, providing an alternative memory of the city.
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 substitute advertisements in film and video with alternative content.
The Artvertiser has received development funding from Intermediae and is being developed in Madrid and Valencia, Spain.
Progress
The Artvertiser is currently in development but already the software is stable and is working quite well. To keep up to date with developments in the project you can follow this blog.We are currently developing a set of urban and weather-proof digital binoculars to guarantee high-quality immersive advertisement substitution. This device will be more performant than most mobile platforms currently available; equipped with a high-quality lens, powerful wireless adaptor, long battery life and plenty of solid state storage space.
Regardless, the software platform is being developed in a portable way such that sufficiently powerful Symbian and Android (Linux) handheld devices can run the software. By the end of the year we hope to target one such platform.
Julian is developing the code for this project while Clara and Diego are focusing on the hardware implementation of the viewing device.
The Artvertiser is a free software project and will be released under the copyright terms of the General Public License v3.0 when completed. It is developed for the Linux platform but it is our aim to target Symbian also.
Videos
Artist Testimony
Julian Oliver, Clara Boj and Diego Diaz are experienced artists working in the vein of Augmented Reality, computer vision and computer graphics. Between them they share 30 years of practice across these areas, having worked with the technology in both research and fine-arts settings.Their work has been exhibited in major museums and electronic art-festivals in Europe, Asia and North America and has received many awards and commissions.