The San Francisco-based
Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and
regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their
Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. Boing Boing tv's hidden cameras captured everything.
And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.
The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote.
Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom.
Posted on April 18, 2008 12:52 PM
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Wrapping up our week-long retrospective of the most crowd-pleezin' episodes in Boing Boing tv's first 6 months of existence, we revisit an episode in which...
Vienna-based art-pranksters monochrom teach us how to "hack the urban context" with campfires, sausages, beer, and an elderly Austrian gentleman who speaks LOL. In the second segment of today's episode, someone constructs a campfire, complete with beer bottles and half-cooked links, right in the middle of the Vienna airport. American kids, don't try this at home unless you want a one-way to Camp X-Ray.
Schnitzel and subversive smores FTW!
Art-prankster Johannes Grenzfurthner of
monochrom storms the front doors of various multinational corporations to ask employees (and random folk on the street) if they're aware that these companies have "corporate anthems." Yes, theme songs, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, always painfully cheesy.
KPMG boasts a particularly heinous ditty, and while renditions sometimes pop up on YouTube, none can be quite so rich as the one we paid an Argentinian street musician $20 to sing. "KPMG, we're strong as can be -- a dream of power and energy!" Bet you $20 the song sticks in your brain longer than you'd like.
Johannes explains, "I told all of the would-be anthem singers that I was interviewing them for an Austrian economics journal called 'Wir kriegen euch' (We will get you, in German)."
Link to previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring Johannes and the monochrom crew.
Posted on March 31, 2008 12:30 AM
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Boing Boing tv received a classified video message from the
People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf -- a message encoded in an almost-obsolete communist LOLcat cypher.
BBtv's terror analysts have decoded this video for you, dear viewer, and we present it in entirety today. Our encryption advisors from monochrom believe the two men in the movie might be His Excellency the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf — Nikita Chrusov — and secretary Nicolai Jossif Malkin.
WARNING: the last few seconds of this terrorist missive contain not-yet-decrypted data that some viewers may find disturbing. Tighten your tinfoil beanies, and lock down your wigs.
Previously on BBtv:
Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf crashes Disney party at ETech
UPDATE: The Soviets respond. Agent moloshnikov from People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf says:
Comrades all over the world!
I still shiver! My heart is filled with universal anger!
Something unspeakable happened!
Again, the mainstream online media outlet “Boing Boing TV” reports about the diplomatic visit of His Excellency Ambassador Nikita Chrusov to the “United States”! Just a friendly vacation trip!
And they label it as “Terrorist Training!”
What an unforgivable insult!
Posted on March 11, 2008 12:00 AM
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Please to be watching. BBtv's invizibul Soviet bureau telexes report:
Soviet Unterzögersdorf is last existing republic of USSR. The enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with surrounding so-called "Republic of Austria" or with the Fortress "European Union." The downfall of her motherland -- the Soviet Union -- in the early 1990s had a particularly bad effect on the country’s economic situation. It is a great challenge to secure survival for the small but proud confederation. External reactionary forces put the country in danger.
His Excellency Ambassador of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, Nikita Chrusov, is entering the Marriott Hotel in San Diego, during O'Reilly ETech conference, to attend a corporate afterparty sponsored by Disney.com.
After four weeks of sea travel on a cargo ship and two weeks of journey in a Greyhound bus, the Ambassador is eagerly awaiting a meeting. He wants to confront Disney executives with a couple of questions, especially talking to them about their "sugar-coated bullets", that threaten the very existence of his country by brutal cultural force.
But then -- he is forcibly ejected from party, like cosmonaut from spaceship escape hatch. Commissar Chrusov calls this act "an unbelievable act of political shortsightness" and complains about mysterious green "poisoned pudding."
Special thanks to
Johnannes and monochrom, who had absolutely nothing to do with this, and to cameo guests
Eddie Codel of
Geek Entertainment TV; Scott Beale of
Laughing Squid (who
covered this incident here); and
John Perry Barlow,
EFF co-founder.
Shot by BBtv segment producer Russ Gooberman.
Update: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf is not amused.
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