Techotic

As advertising takes over our public spaces, a global movement is counter-attacking this corporate monologue, turning it into a public dialog of citizen commentary in the form of speech bubbles.

Ji Lee, a street artist from New York who created the Bubble Project in 2001. He simply tags stickers shaped like speech bubbles and places them over public advertisements and lets the public fill in the blanks with their own words. 30k of these stickers were printed and they were placed all over New york City. The results are photographed and later put online and in a book titled “Talk back: the Bubble Project”.

The advertising ideas he felt would be engaging to the public were always killed due to the conservative approach the industry tends to foster. Most of the ads which ended up getting produced were safe, ugly, and offensive to the public’s intelligence. Adding to his frustration was the fact these ads were filling up every corner of the streets. The urge to create a simple device to instantly break the monotony was born: The Bubble sticker.

Ji feels with the Bubble Project everyone wins. The advertisers get more looks at their ads when bubbled, while the public gets to express themselves and have fun.

Watch the video below: