How to Contribute

I imagine that some of you wonderful folks will decide you'd like to contribute to the anvARTisements project. If you're one of those people, I thank you!

I'm just starting out, so for now, I ask you to either leave a comment on this (or any) posting, or else e-mail me. The e-mail address to use is anvartisements at david lindes, in the com top-level domain. (This of course should be typed as all one word, with appropriate substitutions for at, and a dot before com, etc. I hope you'll understand and find this easy -- Sadly, SPAM is a real problem on the Internet, and I'm trying to minimize what I get in that regard.)

In the future, I may well update this with alternate ways to contact me, and/or a direct paypal link or the like. For now, just send me an e-mail letting me know you'd like to contribute, and your preference on how, and we'll figure the rest out from there. :-)

Again, thank you!

Contact status report: failures: 1; successes: 2? 3?

Well, I e-mailed my old contact, and got back a bounce message:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    [address redacted]

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (state 14).

Sigh.

Ah well, though... I've gone ahead and submitted a contact-us form with Titan Worldwide (who runs the bus advertising for Metro. Oh, and poking around on Metro's site, I find that they list another contact, so I e-mailed her. I got an immediate automatic response to that, as well: this time, an out-of-the-office auto reply for an extended leave. So, I forwarded it on to the other guy. And lo, yet another out-of-the-office reply! This one's only for one business day, though. I can wait until Monday. :-)

More to come!

anvARTisements started

It's time for ART! (Not ads)

OK, I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and now I'm finally doing something about it.

Today, I created a new bank account, funded with $500 of my own money to start, and I'm about to start the process of putting Art where advertisements currently are. This is a sort of anti-advertisement campaign. I find the ads I see to be intrusive at least 99% of the time, and I'd really much rather see Art out there. So I'm going to endeavor to change the landscape -- at least a little.

The idea, in brief:

Anywhere I might see an ad today, I want to eventually have art, instead. Or just nothing at all, except what would be there without the ads.

The name:

I'm going to call this thing "anvARTising" -- a hopefully-obvious combination of "anti-advertising" and "art". It's kinda hoakey, but hey, it's also basically unique, based on the google searches I did. (As of this writing, I get one hit for anvartising, but it looks pretty certain to be a typo.)

I figured I needed something to call this, and that a unique name would be useful, so, here it is. Maybe I'll register a domain at some point. (Hopefully before the squatters... err, yeah, so...)

In the interest of keeping this name to mean what I want it to mean, I hereby declare the following trademarks (registration may happen at a later date) in my own name. And since trademarks are supposed to be used as adjectives, I also give examples of how they might be used:

anvARTise

Get your art seen by the masses with anvARTise artistic media placement

anvARTisement

An anvARTisement artistic media placement.

anvARTising

Welcome to anvARTising artistic media placement

(Later, I'll go study trademark law further, and get these in better shape, and possibly registered. But here's my declaration, as of 2010-03-18, that I (David Lindes) believe these terms to be un-used before me, and that I'm claiming them for this purpose.)

Anyway...

Back to the idea:

Ultimately, this is a global and all-the time goal. But $500 obviously isn't going to get me that overnight, so... I'm starting small. Let's put it in terms of a three-stage goal (with lots of sub-stages in between, to be sure):

Goal 1: Get 1 anvartisement onto 1 bus in 1 city.

OK, maybe two or three, on two or three buses. But at least one. The city I'll start with will be the one I live in, which happens to be Seattle at the moment. I had a conversation some months ago with the appropriate person to talk to about this, so I'm going to dig out her contact info and send her an e-mail tonight, and get the ball rolling. My initial art content will be some Fractal Art based on the Mandelbrot Set that I've been creating recently.

Goal 2: Have enough momentum to buy out all public-transit oriented advertising for at least one day in one city.

I'm sure this won't happen right away, but hey, it's a goal, right? I figure this one will depend very highly on having generated buzz around this, and getting some big funding backers interested. I'll likely have created a formal non-profit organization by then (for now, it's just me, with only the bank account lending any formality to anything).

Any such buzz, of course, is actually a goal unto itself. A big part of the point of this is to get people to think about all the advertising they're assaulted with on a daily basis (with thanks to Shepard Fairey for getting me to start thinking about that more), by displacing it with something else.

Goal 3: International ad-free day (or month? year? century? eternity?)

I think it would be fantastic to have one or more days where all advertisements everywhere (television, billboards, radio, magazines, newspapers, web sites, everything) have been either removed, covered up, or replaced with pure art content.

Now, what do I mean by pure art? Essentially, art that's made to say something, rather than to sell something. The details of defining what does or does not meet that description may well be complex, but the idea is hopefully simple enough.

The basic plan

With the obvious interest in growth (but finite! really!) of this project, I figure I need to have a lot of re-investment sort of thing going on. So here's what I'm going to do with the money:

For the money I contributed to start this thing, and any donations I receive until further notice, 100% of the money goes into the bank account, and from there not more than 10% of the account balance will be paid out each month for direct costs of getting art out there where ads might otherwise be. For the moment, this means one thing and only one thing: The agency that's in charge of getting the ads onto the busses will be paid for the printing costs for the anvartisements,

(At some point, if this really takes off, I might have to have it pay me a salary or something, so that I can have food on my table and a roof over my head -- for now, though, that part is separate from this, and the time spent will be little enough that I can work on other things to take care of that stuff.)

And now...

So now I'm off to go find this gal's contact info, and fire her off a new e-mail, telling her I'm ready to work on getting some Art onto a Bus. (I was previously thinking I'd call this "Art on Busses" or something, but decided I may as well have bigger aspirations.)

I'll report back when I've heard back from her, and generally as progress commences. Please subscribe to this blog if you'd like to get updates.

And in the meantime your comments, questions, criticisms, praise, and of course monetary contributions are welcome.

(Also, I will eventually be looking for art contributions -- but not yet; I've got plenty of fractal-generation ability to get me started, and want to keep things simple for now. That said, if you're an interested artist, feel free to contact me and I'll keep you in the loop as things grow.)