Public Ad Campaign opens up the bus shelter

Jordan Seiler has been quarrelling with outdoor advertising for the best part of a decade. Under the name Public Ad Campaign the New York artist has pulled down, painted over and replaced commercial posters, and in 2009 he organised the New York Street Advertising Takeover, which saw artists whitewash and repaint billboards that had gone up without permission. At the end of January 2015 the project took its next step, and it is a practical one.

Keys for everyone

The new PublicAccess website went live on 31 January. It gives the project what it has lacked: a proper public home, built as open source. Visitors can buy a ready-made key that opens the advertising panels in bus shelters, currently for $35, or download the design and print one at home on a 3D printer. A map shows which key fits which city. The locks are standard across a given transit system but vary from one city to the next, so Seiler has been building up a library of designs, starting with New York, London and San Francisco and adding more as they are worked out.

None of this is entirely new. Seiler and a small circle of artists and photographers have been making and passing round these keys since November 2013, quietly and mostly by word of mouth, and the results have been turning up on Instagram under the hashtag #yeahwegotkeysforthat. The difference now is that anyone can take part.

Several artists got there early. The New York painter ELLE has swapped the contents of shelter cases for her own work, in a takeover photographed by Aymann Ismail for ANIMALNewYork. The Iranian brothers Icy & Sot, now based in Brooklyn, have used the keys, and so has the Australian painter Anthony Lister. Takeovers made with the keys have turned up from Miami and San Francisco to Shanghai.

Seiler’s argument

The reasoning behind the project is worth setting out, because it is more than a prank. Seiler’s case starts with the observation that almost every large city runs buses or trams, and that over the years the shelters and street furniture serving them have been folded into the global outdoor advertising business. In city after city, a handful of international firms build and maintain the shelters and in return hold the exclusive right to fill them with paid adverts.

He argues that this arrangement works against the public. Advertising, in his account, pulls attention away from other people and towards private wants, encourages consumption at the environment’s expense, and crowds out the public’s own voice by making corporate imagery the permanent official language of shared space. The traffic runs one way: the brand speaks, the passer-by receives.

PublicAccess is meant to turn that around by giving ordinary people and artists the means to speak back through the same frames. Seiler presents the keys as working sculptures, objects whose meaning lies in what they let you do. On the project’s own site the keys sit alongside his other interventions as parts of the same body of work.

Whether councils and ad contractors see it that way is another matter. Opening a case without permission is still opening a case without permission. But the proposition is clear enough: the street is a public room, and the walls of the bus shelter ought to belong to the people waiting in it.