Can art change the world? Just possibly. Or at least it may just be able to change the way that certain parts of it look. Coming soon to a wall near you: a vast, black and white, billboard-sized print of a face – which could be yours, your mother's, your child's or a total stranger's.
It's the latest and most spectacular project of the
French street artist, JR: one of the biggest global art projects ever attempted, a public art initiative conceived on a truly monumental scale.
For the project which JR is calling
Inside Out, and which he launched on Wednesday at
TED2011, he's seeking collaborators from all across the world.
He is asking people everywhere to supply him with photos, which he will then return, blown up to billboard-sized prints. He wants us to paste them up for him: on walls, roofs, across buildings, and fences, anywhere it's possible, and preferably in places that matter to us. . It's street art, crowd-sourced and super-sized.
TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.
The project won him this year's
TED prize the prestigious award previously given to Bono, Bill Clinton and Jamie Oliver, which involves being given $100,000 and "One Wish To Change The World". And he announced that this was it: "I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project and together we'll turn the world inside out."
It's not the first time he's attempted to change a street or cityscape. He's taken photos of teenagers from the Paris banlieue and posted them across the city's more chi-chi quartiers. He's covered roofs in a Kenyan shanty town, Kibera, with huge photographic portraits of women who live there. And in Brazil he pasted the walls of a favela in Rio with vast, black and white eyes, in order to give it, quite literally, a more human face. But Inside Out is a of a different order of magnitude altogether.
This time, he wants to use not just his photographs, but ones taken by as many different people as possible, and for them to post them in as many locations, in as many countries of the world as they're able. It is, he says, "a chance for everyone to share who they are and what they stand for". He's asking people to take a photo of "someone they care about and post it somewhere it matters".
Upload the photo with details of what you want to do, and he'll send you back a huge poster-size print for you to post where you want. "Art is not meant to change the world," he told the TED audience. But it can "change perceptions" which in turn will "change energy" and ultimately it is that will "enable you to change the world".
If JR, who calls himself a "photograffeur" and who started out painting illegal grafitti on walls across Paris, had simply announced this on his website, it would be one thing, but the aim of the TED prize is to lever the power of the TED community, one that includes former presidents and the founders of Google, and given what he's achieved before on a tiny budget with no publicity, the results could well be startling.
The website has already been built –
http://www.insideoutproject.net/ – and the printing presses that will make the huge poster-size prints is already in place. All he needs now is your photos.
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Do you want to take part?
