Radio, radio.

As a child my parents would sometimes take me to the Barbican centre. There was nothing fun about the Barbican Centre, the strange interior spaces seemed inexplicable and unnerving and I associate it with sales of charity Christmas cards and craft knickknacks. Thinking about it, I’m really just remembering one occasion when we went to see the Nutcracker Suite, hence the Christmas associations. Craft knickknacks are disappointing for children, because they look like toys, but are actually no fun. As was the absence of the nuts and sweets I had been expecting, hence the lingering resentment.

Anyway, I mastered my antipathy for the place and went to see the exhibition of war photography by Capa and Taro. That exhibition is excellent and I may write about it later, but the thing that really grabbed me was an installation in The Curve gallery near the entrance called Frequency and Volume. It’s by a Mexican artist, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, who seems like a serious dude. As you pass along the gallery a series of powerful lights throw your silhouette onto the opposite wall. The outline of your shadow is then read by a series of computers as a position on the scale of radio frequency – you get a kind of red Redibrek glow around your shadow and a projected caption tells you what frequency and station you’re on. As you walk from one end of the gallery to the other you pass through all the different stations, very much like the red line moving through the dial of an old fashioned FM radio. By moving towards the wall, enlarging your shadow, you pass upwards through AM and FM into mobile phone, astronomical and MoD frequencies, which, for legal reasons, are turned off in the installation’s London incarnation.

It’s great right.

So I’m having this wonderful, joyful interactive experience and all the time I'm thinking of an obscure 1980s cinema ad for Red Stripe in which a red stripe is overlaid over a black and white film following a man through a day in his life, "tuning in" to different stations, until finally he reaches a bar and drinks a pint of Red Stripe. There the music switches to, I imagine, reggae. I can’t find this ad anywhere but I reckon it would be from 1989 or so.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that Rafael Lozano Hemmer ever saw this ad. Or that his installation isn’t a much more interesting thing than the Red Stripe spot. It’s just funny that in this case the ad definitely preceded the artwork, and yet there can be no suggestion that one was copied from the other. But if the two things had happened the other way round, you’d just get that horrible feeling you get when creatives rip off art wholesale and then start spouting off about Andy Warhol or something.

I’m not saying this because I think it’s bad, or unfair, but just that it demonstrates the hierarchy. If you were the Chapman brothers (both of them, so you wouldn’t have to argue about it) you could do a series poor copies of adverts, or even just copies of ads taken from YouTube, and sell them for millions as studies of the relation between commercial ideas and ideas that sell. It wouldn’t be good, or even original, art, but it would really annoy advertising people.

Installation 2/135 - Camera phone, blog, antique poster.

So this is the second in my series of 135 relational art works, carried out using just my mobile phone camera, this blog and existing advertising media.

This one is called "I just didn't know how to trust."

It's ancient advert for Abbey National, revealed during the renovation of one of CBS Outdoor's advertising sites on the tube. I'd date this poster as coming from around 1960, or even the late 50s, I'm not even sure it is a poster - it might be painted - there is nothing digital out there that gives this colour scheme for the brand. It's not 80s cause they had the umbrella-house logo by then, and it's not 70s because it's not brown and orange.

Even if the ad has only been there 40 years, had you taken its advice at the time, your savings of £10,000, with compound interest, would now be worth in the order of hundreds of thousands of pounds. In real terms, with inflation, more or less what you'd invested. Like it says "safety first".

(These calculations may be flawed, so if you know better, please let me know.)

The installation is open now, at the bottom of the escalators leading to the Piccadilly Line at Kings Cross Station. I haven't actually come to any kind of arrangement with the curators of my art works, CBS Outdoor, so they'll probably put one of those clever Lycatel ads with the bloke whose head is also the globe over it any second now. It's all about transience darling.

Now I just have to find another 133 of these.

Installation 3/135 - Camera phone, blog, scrolling billboard

Ok, this is the third in my series of 135 relational art pieces, created using this blog, my camera phone and existing advertising media.

This one is called, "Once I thought I understood."

It's based on a scrolling poster which is visible to one side of the tube tracks if you gawp upwards outside Ladbroke Grove station in west London. As you can see, the first poster features the gnomic headline "You can't smell a city from a coach" - while you stand there, trying to work out what that could mean, perhaps contemplating the fin de siècle obscurity of modern advertising, the roller rolls over and you get the other poster, this totally incoherent ideogram advertising McCain's oven chips - the result, no doubt, of Trevor Beattie's hiring a creative department entirely from the JLS fanbase.

As it rolls back and forth over your mind, like a subnormal groundsman trying to flatten a tortoise into a cricket square, you may find your stream of consciousness assuming a strange pitch of bewilderment.

so the sunflower, shines on a a potato, which falls like but surely from a plane you can't falls like rain? But why is that because generally I go on a smell holiday I assume it's suggesting a natural process and yet actually a grey hound bus holiday in the US potato, but damp like chips

So the installation is now open - go along, stand there outside Ladbroke Grove station feeling hopeless, maybe even have your fancy multimedia PDA phone nicked by someone who, let's face it, needs it even less than you do.

Installation 5/135 - Camera phone, blog, digital advertising site

Back by, would you believe it, popular demand, this is the fifth in my series of 135 relational art installations, created using just my camera phone, existing advertising media and this blog. We're really whizzing through these aren't we?

This one is called "I didn't come here to be insulted."

It flashed up on one of the super-futuristic-hi-tech advertising pods that are scattered all over the massive echoing spaces of The Westfield. I'm spending a lot of time in the Westfield in fact I've secretly started to think of myself as "the poet of the Westfield." Not just one of the unemployed, wandering zombie-like through a shopping mall as though I still had money to buy things. Not. at. all.

So the headline is for Timberland and looks to me like the handiwork of one of adland's most feared writers, Tim Delaney, author of some of advertising's most abrasive headlines including "Table for two? Certainly you old trout."(Berlitz, 1991), "It's a Philips, Phucker" (Philips, 1985) and also "We took their buffallo, their land and their women. Then we went back for their shoes." (Timberland, 1992).

There's something delicious about an ultramodern high-tech media display being used to flash snide abuse at shoppers in a recently opened and totally deserted shopping mall at the beginning of what's shaping up to be a major-recession-shaped recession.

The installation is now open, go along, contemplate your inadequate pension provision and maybe don't buy any hiking boots. They're only worn by closeted homosexuals anyway.

PS: First time readers, I suggest you click the tag below for the entire series. Then at least you'll have some idea what's going on. Maybe email me, if you work it out.

UPDATE: My Dad (who is also acting sub-editor) pointed out that the "closeted homosexuals" remark might be interpreted as homophobic. I'd like point out that all my best friends are closeted homosexuals.

Installation 4/135 - Camera phone, blog, distressed cross-track site

Just when you thought I'd flogged it to death, here is the fourth of my attempts to turn shit to gold by creating a series of 135 relational art works using just my camera phone, existing advertising media and this blog.

This one is called "They are using a kind of ray to penetrate my thoughts."

As you can see it's created from a cross-track which once displayed the rather nice photographic campaign for The Saturday Times - but it's been stripped off the site, producing an arty patina and revealing the apparently meaningless series of letters "A TURD AY".

The installation is now open on the Northbound platform of the Bakerloo Line at Charing Cross. Go along, contemplate the idea that, despite being discouraged by all the major religions and your girlfriend, egotism is really the only thing that imbues the universe with meaning, otherwise it's just so many worthless inkblots, shown by a mad psychiatrist to an empty couch.

To view the series so far, click here.

Installation 1/135 - Camera phone, blog, digital advertising media.

Today I'm going to branch out from the normal fare of swearing, pessimism and prejudice that has been alienating increasing segments of my readership into creating large-scale advertising-based conceptual art pieces, using just this blog, my mobile phone camera and existing advertising media. There, that should irritate the six of you that are still reading.

This first piece is called "How do you know I'm not really important?"

It's based on the two enormous LCD advertising screens at the eastern edge of the Westfield site in Shepherds Bush. The screens are designed to show a series of ads at 96 sheet size to the traffic circulating on the Shepherds Bush roundabout - this they do without subtlety. However, as a pedestrian, having picked your way across the eight lane motorway intersection, with its murderously brief light-changes, you're then directed into a paved, litter-filled trench (actually the entrance to the old, now, spookily, sealed subway) which puts you out of the sightline of the two billboards. This gully is intermittently flooded with light from the adverts overhead, which you, both too close and too low, are unable to see.

The effect is a lot like having someone at a party ignore you to shout over the top of your head at the person they really want to talk to and is both demeaning and somehow disarmingly honest. Hence the title.

It's also slightly like something from Bladerunner.

Anyway, the installation is open from now, until it eventually crumbles into rust and cinders. So hurry down and see it.

There's fuck all work here today, so aside from laughing at the art director, who is doing some last minute recession Christmas "shopping" from the stationary cupboard I might don my slippers, light my pipe and write a bumper post on Patrick Hamilton, alcoholism and Christmas. Until some officious HR munchkin comes and sprays me with flame retardent foam.