Comments on: You Are Beautiful

By: josh g.

josh g. — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:03:20 +0000

Now that is also awesome.

(And mentioning that first instead of bashing ‘you are beautiful’ without giving a reason would’ve been much less annoying.)

By: zombiegluesniffer

zombiegluesniffer — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:43:34 +0000

yeah, i’m pretty ugly- that’s better.

and i’d just rather a visual pun.

http://www.space-invaders.com/attackdw.html

By: scott

scott — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:12:37 +0000

Perhaps the effects of all the glue sniffing have taken their toll on your personal beauty.

By: nick

nick — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 22:35:01 +0000

That’s another good idea for text to put on a widely-distributed and widely-applied sticker. I think you should go for it.

By: zombiegluesniffer

zombiegluesniffer — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 22:30:02 +0000

ridiculous and pointless

By: Vvoi

Vvoi — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:54:30 +0000

brilliant.
in a course i took with the british theater/performance group Third Angel, we showed people clipboards with nice things written on them. a very enriching and interesting experience. one of the signs someone put was “you are beautiful”, but, as we later discussed, the personal approach makes it sometimes complicated, as if the person was making fun at the other person. here, by creating stickers, the sentence becomes anonymous and the problem disappears. then of course, it might make me smile – but it won’t do much more than that (then again, smiling is good).
“manifesto” page.

The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.”

How exactly can one experiment with “letting things manifest themselves” by actively manifesting them yourself?

By: brian

brian — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 15:00:50 +0000

Where in Chicago did you see a lot of these? I live up in Rogers Park, and haven’t come across any as of yet.

A friend of mine has done a similar project in Houston and Madison called “Chicken Boy.” http://www.chicken-boy.org/

By: scott

scott — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:45:12 +0000

The “OBEY” project started out with one guy in Providence, Rhode Island in 1990. There’s a good essay along with a huge collection of material about the project and downloads on the obeygiant site. Click on essays, sticker art for the history. The first OBEY art I saw was made with spraypaint and stencils. It sounds like he was giving away stickers, but not via the internet.

By: josh g.

josh g. — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 05:42:09 +0000

This is excellent.

I remember looking up the OBEY project, after seeing its annoyingly disturbing-yet-memorable images around town in Winnipeg. Did it actually distribute free stickers, though, or just make images available that you could print to stickers yourself?

The only other sticker campaign I’ve been exposed to (knowingly) that distributed the stickers for free was an anti-alien (as in, space) project. Lots of little round stickers sent out with a red circle-and-line crossing out one of the bulgy-head, oval-eyed iconic alien faces that were so big in the 90’s, and you could mail a request for a free roll. It sort of stuck with me, or more accurately to my wallet (still have one on the inside).

And all that is to say, I may have to get some of these ones. And the installations are great, although clicking through four of the photo collections in quick succession makes my eyes start to see ‘beautiful’ as some bizarre jumble of letters instead of a word.