Cutup Billboards

Filed under Film/Video, Ongoing Event, Installation, projects

Event Information

Artist: CutUp Group

Billboard posters created using pre-existing billboards and pre-existing patterns in the urban environment to create new formulas for image making i.e. transcribing urban sounds to musical score and using this code as a method of production.

Our definition of play is to deliberately break the rules and invent our own, thus freeing creative activity from restrictions, to redesign aesthetic and revolutionary actions that undermine or elude social control.

Our belief in utilising existing materials on the street led to ideas of changing posters and objects without adding anything new just recycling what was there already. We see this as moving the pieces around like a giant puzzle, whilst commenting upon the action of reordering. As described by Umberto Eco in Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, the use of the existing media is the only way to comment upon it or challenge it. We are interested in the idea of the street as a stage for intervention or creative activity as determined by Walter Benjamin and later the Situationists. Although we put work up in the street we do not define ourselves purely as street artists, rather artists working in urban intervention. We aim to introduce elements of disquiet into the urban everyday and comment on the existing systems and structures that determine our existence in the modern metropolis.

For the Conflux festival we will create a series of new billboards constructed from existing New York advertisements. Imagery for the new posters will be created using pre-existing patterns in the urban environment to create new formulas for image making i.e. transcribing urban sounds to musical score and using this pattern to create new work. All of the individual pieces of the billboard are numbered so working to a code is an essential part of our practice. Different to our previous work, we intend to create far more abstracted imagery for Conflux.
To view construction of our previous work look at the following link…
http://www.niubcn.com/galeries/galeria_cutup_cat.htm
http://www.niubcn.com/galeries/galeria_cutup_esp.htm