Utility Pole Blues

DOWNTOWN TORONTO, Nov. 18 - These streets are made for the voices of the public and no advertisers can suppress our urge to make our voices heard! Although the cold, cloudy and wet weather tried to keep us off of the city sidewalks, nothing would prevent us from posterizing all the downtown utility poles in sight.

Much like the guerilla postering on the Gulelph-Humber campus, AD-ios! hit Toronto to raise a larger awareness among the public beyond the constraints of the indoors. In the public forum, our freedom of speech is easily conveyed through posterization, a creative and democratic method of exchanging ideas and culture. However, while vigorously taping our mugshot campaign posters across the utility poles of Kensington Market and Queen Street West, we came to realize that this right is also threatened by advertisers.

Not only have advertisements infringed on our public space by erecting large billboards that clutter our cityscape, but they have also attacked the utility poles used by the public, making it difficult to find space to place posters. With no allotted space, covering other posters with those of our own was the only option in conveying our message. To avoid sabotaging the messages of other local citizens, we attacked the large corporate advertisements, covering some from top to bottom in AD-ios! campaign posters.

However, this too also has it's implications because other 'posterers', carrying the messages of the corporate media, recommended that we shouldn't post our posters over theirs' during our posterization campaign. According to these 'posterers', they would inevitably be covered up by a new advertising campaign and advised us to cover up the smaller, non-privatized posters instead. In an advertisement saturated society, does a common public forum exist? Or are we now solely forced to use virtual space as a democratic platform?

We want and deserve our right to public space and the easy accessibility to posterize without corporate threat!