Pro, con or indifferent to billboards and graffiti, those of you interested in the state of Los Angeles' public space have plenty of options to help you both beautify and think about the city we call home.
Want to help beautify? Art and civic organization Farmlab will be participating in the William Mead Community Beautification Project, Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 8am-1pm.
Those of you interested in other such programs can find them at the LA Board of Public Works Office of Community Beautification.
Do you have a theory like Too Tall Jahmal's about the relationship between things like graffiti and outdoor advertising that you'd like to share?
The Public School at Telic is an open-source public lecture project where the community is invited to submit ideas for classes. They'll be holding some lectures during October and early November inside the Richard Serra sculpture at LACMA, in collaboration with the folks at Machine Project. What better place to teach (or learn) about public and private spaces?
Of course, we would never, EVER encourage you leave a permanent mark on property you don't own or control. But those of you with uncontrollable urges in that respect would do well to visit the website of the Graffiti Research Lab.
Designers of high-tech (and non-permanent!) art projects like the L.A.S.E.R. Tagger depicted below, the folks at Graffiti Research Lab have taken what's essential about graffiti - projecting an individual voice - and severed it from the unfortunate property-destruction-arrested-night-in-lockup bits. Their hq is in NYC, but why should the East Coast have all the fun. If you adapt any of their techniques to local use, put a picture of it up in the SoCal Connected Flickr Pool.
RELATED STORIES:
Billboard Confidential - By Correspondent Vince Gonzales - Los Angeles is the billboard capital of the nation and some are saying it is an environmental disaster - a disaster that doesn’t seem to be getting the attention of city leaders.
Commentary - By Sam Hall Kaplan - Sam Hall Kaplan, the former design critic for the L.A. Times and an Emmy-award winning former reporter for Fox News, praises billboards in Los Angeles, believing an array of brilliant, blinking conceits will mark LA as the creative capital of the world.
WEB ORIGINAL:
Ad-Buster - By Web Team - Billboard Liberators: Graffiti artists use illegal billboards in Los Angeles as giant canvases.
Photo credit: The image associated at the top of this piece was taken by Flickr user Adan Garcia. It was used under Creative Commons license.
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i LOVE graffiti research lab
Thank You! Muchas Gracias?
The Billbords invading the city of Los Angeles has been causing me great concern to put it mildly...the feature gave me a measure of relief to know that thousands of other Angelinos feel the same and some as the activits you profiled, are couragous enough to take action.
Shame on City Council members and DA-Delgadillo for caving-in to the political corruption and buyout by the big three companies!All the communities left to fend for themselves are the real losers...Elected leaders all need to be held accountable during the next election cycle. Count me in!
Great Programing-serves the interests of the ordinary citizen.Hope enough response will get someone's attention.
jnp
Your story is much appreciated and will help to raise awareness about billboard blight and will hopefully inspire citizens of Los Angeles to join together to work for strong government regulation of the outdoor advertising industry.
At the close of the story, it is mentioned that the City receives $ 186 per sign for a billboard permit fee. That would leave viewers believing that the fee is an annual one when in fact, the secretly negotiated billboard lawsuit settlement set the inspection fee at $ 162 for a THREE YEAR period (meaning that there is a $ 62 annual inspection fee). The 2002 billboard ordinance that the industry sued to stop had a larger annual fee that would have enabled the City's Dept. of Building and Safety to hire an adequate number of inspectors so that the job of inventorying legal and illegal billboards could be accomplished in a year.
Instead, under the billboard settlement with the $ 62/year permit fee established it will take nearly THREE YEARS to complete the City's first comprehensive billboard inventory.
The citizens of the City have waited long enough for the inventory to be done (since 2002) and we have had to fight to see that the inventory lists would be made public. Now we will have to wait nearly three years because the permit fee has been set so low that a skeleton inspection team is all that the fee will pay for. In these times of civic budget woes, a program like this must be self-supporting. So, while the signs earn thousands and thousands of dollars for their companies, the companies behind them decided to sue the City, cause the City to spend scarce funds to fight them and then participated in crafting a settlement that resulted in inspection fees of a paltry $ 62 per year. By the way, the second three year inspection fee is lower than the first... despite the fact that costs for performing the required inspections will rise as a result of inflation, etc.
KCET might present a program that looks at the secretly negotiated billboard settlement itself. As was reported in the SoCal Connected story, hundreds of conventional billboards will be allowed to be converted to digital format. What the story did not reveal was the process for permit issuance that was described in the settlement document. Each company involved in the settlement is allowed to apply for 10 conversions per company per month. The City is apparently allowed one month "to act upon the permit applications" and if it does not do so, the agreement says: "UNTIL THE CITY HAS DONE SO, THE CITY SHALL REFRAIN FROM ACTING UPON ANY APPLICATIONS FOR BUILDING, DEMOLITION, OR RELOCATION PERMITS FOR ANY STRUCTURE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SIGNS, SUBMITTED TO IT AFTER THE APPLICABLE MONTHLY SUBMISSION DATE." The capital letters are my own. The outrage that they express should be shared with and by the entire City.
One can only hope that by exposing the tactics employed by this industry and by having citizens tell our City Council, Mayor and City Attorney that we have had enough, that we will see the crafting of a new off-site sign ordinance that will reign in this out-of-control industry. The City Council passed an interim control ordinance/moratorium on all outdoor signage that was adopted December 17th. Now the City Attorney's office has three months to write a new sign ordinance. Those concerned should keep a careful watch on what is being written because it will become the City's new regulations for conventional, digital and other sign formats. Constituents should thank your local City Council member for supporting the moratorium and urge the adoption of a new off-site ordinance that will protect neighborhoods from the onslaught of billboards.