If you aren't familiar with the book, Beautiful Trouble, you should be. It is a very thorough compendium of strategies and tactics aimed at the disruption of the dominant and increasingly insupportable paradigm, and hails itself as "A Toolbox For Revolution." Naomi Klein referred to it as "a crash course in the emerging field of carnivalesque realpolitik, both elegant and incendiary." Andrew Boyd, the "assembler" of the catalogue, structured the book around various categories such as Tactics, Principles, Theories, Case Studies and Practitioners and it covers concise and interlinked narratives ranging from culture jamming to hoaxes to debt revolt to hashtag politics. When the book came out in 2012, I immediately purchased it, and often look through its offerings especially when I am feeling the emotional weight of a rapidly warming world juxtaposed with the smug malignant smiles of the Koch brothers. It is an easy book to pick up and dip in and out of its catalogic format, and for me it always feels a bit empowering.
A year after I bought the book, that is, a few months ago, I was contacted by the "assemblers" asking if the
Overpass Light Brigade would like to be represented as a tactic on the Beautiful Trouble website with potential inclusion in future editions of the book. Are you kidding? I didn't wait long to respond! At first, I thought I'd simply be asked to write up a summary of what we do and how we began, and I did just that, but grew to be quite impressed with their editorial process. They are very rigorous with their demands for concision, quality of writing, and specificity of form, in order to achieve an overall consistency for the project. A few months of Google doc editing and a lot of emails later, the first new inclusion of the year 2014 was added to the category of Tactics… Light Brigades!
Check it out, it was launched just yesterday! Tactic: Light Brigade
We also just completed and shipped our first "plug-in project" of signs spelling PROTEST! for an exhibition of the same name in Colorado Springs that will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre. We worked with plug-in permanence rather than battery-enabled mobility, and also got a little bit fancy with silver leafing behind the lights so that the sign will be highly visible throughout the day. OLB has a 50 foot wall in the
Contemporary Art Galleries of UCCS to paste messages and project videos onto. We've taken pictures of every letter we have and will be printing them at scale and wheat-pasting them onto walls. The look of "light-font letters" is really cool and we are interested to see what happens in this more institutional space. We look at it as just another bandwidth to occupy in order to further the message of engagement, empowerment and the necessity of being both seen and heard in this era when systems collapse.