For the following case-study, AAB representatives went to Bogotá (Colombia) in order to execute a intervention project. Inspired by the extensive use of (press) printed media in public space advertising (distinctive of this city, especially while on political campaigns season), flooding the streets with a massive amount of messages than soon enough render unrecognizable due its chaotic juxtaposition patterns, we decided to implement Tactical Media practices to reactivate the spots where most this overloaded communication stream circulates in order to transform them into spaces suited for civic participation and critical exchange. That's why our “analytics team” suggested an inter-media (half written printed medium) be designed specifically to broad-cast public’s announcements and ensure significance of the send-word by providing a platform where the technical and legal inconveniences characteristic of traditional public-writing methods such graffiti, which, by the way, is also heavily practiced, displaying its (d)ubiety by tagging systematically the same hosting sites. Being that said, after a couple weeks, our “(trans)media research department” conceived and developed Monogram, a collective-writing exercise in which about seven hundred copies of a pseudo typographic design became a Typesetting Experimental Station, where any text could be composed character-by-character after editing/inking the template of our paper-based stereotype(face) with simple pen stokes once posted over the walls designated for speech commerce. Squatting the propagandistic replication headquarters to insert in its serial ports of trifler storage real statements created by the target itself. Nonetheless, composing such hybrid interface was just the beginning, for it to be really operative, first, we needed to structure a (tactical) media plan in which users resistance, and the distribution delay are some of the factors to be taken into account in order to transform the weaknesses of the uncategorized medium into subscripting qualities/abilities.

 

We started choosing the sectors with more traffic, where the chances to assist its reiterative imprinting are significantly better. Therefore we decided to follow the criteria of the local out-of-home-advertising policies, in which the approved placements tend to be allotted according to its degree of abandonment. These allocations are normally situated along the main avenues given the lack of maintenance of such vast, and sometimes conflictive, areas. Being that so, the routes chosen were The Carrera Séptima and the Avenida NQS. The first is one of the most culturally, historically and institutionally representative of the city, since most governmental facilities and  remarkable architecture examples are located. Meanwhile the latter extends for 40km crossing the city from northeast to southwest, is the route that a considerable portion of the population has to undertake on a daily basis, and, of course, one of the busiest and (not only) visually contaminated, even after (and partly because of) several urban expansion plans have been carried on, resulting in its characteristics raw-wall surrounding landscape, the ideal scenario for urban mobiliary ornamentation initiatives. Lastly, the settlement stage got completed after identifying a set of tentative shelters where more specific comprehensive art writing experiments could take place, in order to explore the possibilities of the recently developed transference system therefore expanding its action field and understanding. A couple of these examples where found at the advertising-ready façade of the Central Cemetery of Bogota (currently under a re-signification process through gentrification strategies, including the inauguration of its front street as the more spacious and dubious canvas of Bogota’s emergent street art movement) and the massive gates of a building and a warehouse alongside the NQS, formerly occupied with one of the the administrative offices of the Police Department.

 

The second tactical media measure was to devise a communication strategy impressive/powerful enough to invite the public to participate of the experiment, given that it is also known that most Colombians are reluctant to get involved in co-laboratory initiatives, mostly due skepticism towards socio-politic change (specially through art) or fear to retaliation by the authorities. In this order of ideas, two sets of messages were consigned in the inscription platforms: one dealing with the characteristics of the media in the asigned context, and other with incomplete statements using the key words of the latter, both (re)created by our copywriters in residence as a demonstration to the readership/authorship of how does the editing methodology work in the transformation process of an apparently disjoined array of words into coherent statements. That way, the third content tactic (actually the first), a series of blank posters with no intended message (blank pages), began to make sense.

 

The third and final tactic is content dispersion/distribution though the assemblage –and subsequent uploading/linking- of a video-essay storing a compilation of our half written statements on printed media and their multiple translations (resulting after permuting the many possible interpretations of every word articulating each sentence) rearranged in a sequence of argumentation in a montage meant to resemble the time-line of the context in which the project took place, including both the implications of developing/executing an experiment on public type-writing, and the transformation suffered by the contents consigned and its hosting platform as chronotope phenomena subject to medium-specific restrictions, all this in order to overwrite their respective definition as (if) happenings transcending its ephemeral (pre)essence.