Stickers and street posters for Blockupy Frankfurt and Blockupy Deportation Airport (also in Frankfurt) now blanket Berlin. What I find interesting, though, is the contrast between these in 2013 (above) compared to these in 2012 (below).
Shouts and whispers
Some stickers shout. Others whisper. With 7,269 pipes and 113 registers, the organ at the Berliner Dom really belts it out.
Cute little paste-ups
Found these cute little paste-ups near Neurotitan Gallery, but it was too shady for the camera’s GPS geo-tagging setting to be turned on. Paste-up directions can be found on the Activist’s ToolKit Wiki.
Bicycling around Berlin…
… is superb.
Berlin’s revolutionary past
I’ve read in a few different places about someone who gives walking tours in Berlin that focus on the city’s historical revolutionary past. You can read Walk don’t burn: Revolutionary walking tours from the Exberliner and May Day Tourism in Berlin: Anti-Capitalist Tour Guide Offers Riot Sightseeing from Spiegel Online International, but also check out the actual Revolutionary Berlin Web site where they outline German Revolution and May Day Riots tours. Here is the description for the German Revolution tour. How Berlin workers toppled the Kaiser and ended the war in 1918 The workers’ movement and the First World War…
Barbie’s Not-So-Dream House
A new 50,000 square-foot “Barbie Dream House” theme park opened in Berlin last week near Alexanderplatz, though it’s actually a huge pink tent made out of canvas and plastic. The 15 Euros price tag for admission made it too pricey for me to go in (but I did have a Skipper doll when I was a kid). I rode by, though, to check it out. At the opening, a women’s rights group, Femen, protested the Dreamhouse as sexist propaganda, which you can read about at Protesting Pink: Barbie Dreamhouse Gets Fiery Welcome in Der Spiegel (May 17, 2013) and at…
Mapping right-wing stickers?
Yesterday while biking along the Rathausstraße, a popular restaurant and shopping area in Alexanderplatz, I came across several anti-Muslim stickers that are too offensive to post on Stickerkitty. I’ve been debating what to do and how to write about them in a neutral and ethical way. Posting offensive images can be a dangerous thing, I think, even if I were to simply describe what was going on in the stickers (i.e., what is being represented and/or communicated). The stickers were out in public and in plain view, but posting them online seems different. I’ll share a little of what could…
Geo-tagging in Berlin #2
Geo-tagging digital photographs is getting easier and more complicated. My new and evolving work flow goes like this. Rather than photograph any or every sticker that comes my way (it’s laborious to turn on/off the GPS settings every time, and I come across 100s of stickers a day, anyway), I’m learning to photograph stickers at a particular location and let that group of stickers tell the story. Yesterday, for example, I was walking along Torstraße in Prenzlauer Berg and came to a corner café with signs that read “BAIZ Bleibt!” (or “BAIZ remains”), a phrase I’d already seen on a…
Geo-tagging in Berlin #1
The geo-tagging on Stickerkitty’s map is coming along slowly. It takes a little while to set the GPS on the camera, so I need to be careful out in public so as not to draw attention to what I’m doing. Not that anyone really cares, but I like to keep a low profile. It’s also taking a long time to load photos onto Flickr, though that might be a slow Internet connection. The few I’ve loaded so far are showing locations perfectly! The next thing to do will be to figure out how to tag with words and whether to…
Limited edition sticker packs
Featuring two sticker packs recently scanned for the Street Art Graphics digital image collection. The first is a set of ten designs by Shepard Fairey for the limited edition Obey Giant Gold Sticker Pack released in 2010 in an edition of 1,000. All of the stickers are printed in gold, red, and black on a cream background. Nine stickers include the signature Obey Giant face within a star logo. The package includes the text, “Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989. Propaganda Engineering. Urban Renewal. Obey Giant Environmental Enhancement Kit: Peel and Adhere to Customize and Improve Any Surface. Phenomenal Results in…