| ABOUT THE STICKER PHENOMENON When passing through our urban surroundings there is a tiny colored phenomenon visible on surfaces like spouts, windows, doorways, toilets, public transport, etc. – somehow stickers have been always there and are a little more than small notes. It seems that urban communication has seen a shift in responsibility: after years of occupation of our cities by huge commercial advertising campaigns resulting in a pictorial flood of billboards, ever-present sponsoring of communal and public facilities the corporates seemed to have won the fight for the urban decoration and logoization of our everyday life. Young activists all over the world learned how easy it is to create their own signs and logos which are able to subvert the existing semiotic system by using the known signs, changing them and putting them into a new context – the context of eduction (in the meaning of Kants Aufklärung) and appropriation. We know the movement called graffiti, but unlike grafitti these infantile little stickers don’t have the gesture of destruction inherent in their form – rather the gesture of connotation and satiric annotation. Those interventions are much more representative for a critical mind seeking to contribute to the social urban interexchange, without doubting the principle of defacing private property. The urban semiotic system is no longer a hierarchical system of guidance through a consumeristic cosmos promising happiness, love, fulfillment and enlightenment by buying characterless fetishes of mass production. It has changed from an emitter-acceptor principle to an open, democratic playground – a world that is ready for your comment. The first international sticker award was launched on January 2005 and had over 2500 submissions of graphics and photos from all over the world. This year already more than 5000 sticker works arrived – and we will continue to focus on the collection and exhibition of international stickers and want to encourage you to take action yourself by making your everyday surrounding into one that suits you best and one that represents you and your individual ideas at the highest level. No compromises. |