Hacking the Branding of Public Space: The Artvertiser

There is a nice project currently created for hacking the visual representation of open urban space by creating means to sublime the quite intense branding in public open spaces in certain urban centers around the globe. If we consider how important and (pre)dominant billboards and commercial signs have become in defining how our cities look like and with which information our society gets feed and conditioned every day.

Art lover hunting for fresh impressions with the help of The Artvertiser. [copyright The Artvertiser via image source]

The Artvertiser, is 'a software platform for replacing billboard advertisements with art in real-time. It works by teaching computers to 'recognise' individual advertisements so they can be easily replaced with alternative content, like images and video.'  [source]

Funtional diagram of The Artvertiser. [image copyright and source Julian Oliver]

 The project was initiated by Julian Oliver in February 2008 and is now being developed in collaboration with Damian Stewart.
The developers refer to the artvertiser 'as a form of Augmented Reality technology' and consider it to be 'an example of Improved Reality.' [source]

See how The Artvertiser works:

Augmented Billboards 2: The Artvertiser @ Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

The Artvertiser was released as fully working beta software and has been appearing in Berlin as part of Transmediale 2010, in Brussels for the Europe wide Media Facades Festival and in four inner-city walks during Rotterdam's Image Festival. [source]

Please see Julian Oliver's TEDx talk in which he explains more about The Artvertiser. I will buy the first batch of Artvertiser sunglasses!