Can video billboards normally displaying advertising be transformed into art? Three artists agree they can. These billboards are placed allover NYC at subway stations, and apart from spreading commercial messages, they make perfect light sources for unauthorized art.

The Pixelator is IMO the most innovative of the three. By using a grid of walls and diffusion gel, you get a live pixel effect on any TV screen.

Light criticism by Anti-Advertising Agency and Graffiti Research Lab is using the billboards as a light source by covering it with a board with message cut out. The messages are anti-commercial, like NYC’s TRUE GRAFFITI PROBLEM, GRAFFITI and GRAFFITI = ADVERTISING
You should check out the rest of Graffiti Research Lab’s projects as well.

The idea of the The Abstractor is to mask out everything shown on the screen but a thin horizontal line, and so make an abstract subset of the TV image.

Click on any of these links for a better description and instructions how to build that project. Each link also contains videos of the project in action.

Through: Project October