When the city sets up so-called ‘Info Pillars’ on the sidewalks – but then fills them with ads instead of actual information – how should the community respond? In Toronto, hacktivists decided to simply take things into their own hands, and replace the ads with art and information that’s actually useful.

Last fall, the Spacing Toronto blog asked, “Is this really an ‘info’ pillar?”, displaying photographs of the installations. The narrow space on the column itself has info like maps and bus schedules, but the overwhelming majority of the pillar is covered in ads.

Armed with special Torx screwdrivers, guerilla group cARTography TO nonchalantly broke into the Info pillars in broad daylight and replaced 35 ads with poetry and street art. One was cordoned off with a velvet rope and attendant security guard, the sign reading “Sidewalk 54 – Private pavement for diamond members only. Dress code strictly enforced.”

“We got together and started planning an artistic assault against them,” an unidentified cARTography TO activist told The National Post. “One, to beautify the city and beautify the pillars because we thought they were awful and ugly, but also to raise a lot of awareness on the issue…. They disrupt the flow of traffic for pedestrians. They block the line of sight for cyclists and for drivers.”

Toronto artist Sean Martindale donated six pieces of art to cARTography for the guerilla installation, including a modified bicycle. The pillars were previously hacked in January. Activists covered them in chalkboards and invited passersby to ‘Tell it like it is.’

Tired of seeing advertisements plastered all over city surfaces, from billboards to bus stops? French artist The Wa has a simple solution: pull down the shade. The installation artist placed roller blinds over ads in the city of Toulouse, allowing passersby to decide whether or not they want to look at them.

With public advertising seemingly reaching a saturation point – they’re even printed on manholes! – it’s no surprise that some people are feeling a little ad fatigue. Small guerilla efforts to replace ads with art or create ‘subvertising’ call to mind the more extreme efforts of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, which was scrubbed clean of advertising in 2006 thanks to the mayor’s ‘Clean City Law’. Six years later, the city is still ad-free.

Artist The Wa is generally known for larger installations. ‘Playground’ turned a do-not-enter sign into a basketball hoop with a  trash bag that promotes both fun and civic responsibility. Another installation spells out ‘Wrong World’ using brand logos. ‘Different Techniques’ reproduces large posters of flowers – the favorites of Kim Jong-Il and his son, Kim Il-Sung – and places them in a Western cityscape, juxtaposed with more conventional advertisements.

Alexandra Ross says of The Wa, “The most common relationship we are likely to have with the work of The Wa is with hindsight or through hearsay. Its critical, subversive provocations resist a lengthy duration in the public arena that would afford one the opportunity to experience it first hand. The lifespan of the artworks vary in public exposure, installation and removal. Therefore, it is the temporality of his work that is crucial to its reading.”

Do you ever feel like you’re adrift on a sea of corporate branding, intrusive advertising and omnipresent logos? Advertising has become so ubiquitous that we’re now seeing high schools and Little League teams sporting the logos of companies big and small. French animation collective H5 took on the disturbingly ever-present corporate branding phenomenon in this short called “Logorama.” Warning to sensitive readers: the film contains a lot of profanity along with some violence and a little cartoon nudity.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.

The film features an alternate-reality Los Angeles where absolutely everything – people, buildings, cars – is made up of logos. The directors could have simply shown us 15 minutes of animated logos and we would have still been impressed, but they instead take us through an epic crime story with a surprising ending. Part of the fun is watching it over and over and spotting new things every single time. The film is positively stuffed with brands, mascots and logos that will make you alternately laugh and cringe.

H5, the studio behind the project, consists of François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain. Their exceptionally well-produced short was introduced at Cannes in 2009 and opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It also took home a 2010 Academy Award in the category of animated short. It’s not hard to see why the film has won such popularity and admiration: it is a biting satire on the brand-obsessed modern America with a fair amount of humor thrown in.