Where: Neubaugasse, 1070 Vienna, Austria

When: June 6-20, 2005

What: DELETE! Delettering the public space.
“For a period of two weeks all advertising signs, slogans, pictograms, company names and logos will disappear from a shopping street in Vienna’s 7th district. The fabric of signs and signals so characteristic of our cities, which normally fills the space between the architectural structures and the urban movement flows, is eliminated, and the public space is 'delettered’. Thanks to the Delete! art project, the commercial street falls silent, as it were: the unequivocal, biunique messages are deleted to make room for an unpredictable openness, a baffling virtuality.

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The technique at the heart of Delete! is ‘wallpapering’, which is easy and inexpensive: all written signals (except for those necessary for road safety) will be covered over with monochrome, fluorescent foils, and individual three-dimensional letters will be enclosed in plastic.

Delete! may also be understood as an artistic statement on the repeatedly renewed discourse about advertising in the public space: to what extent do advertising spaces and signalling techniques shape the aesthetic picture of a city? How far do they influence the residents’ experience of life?”

An installation by Christoph Steinbrener & Rainer Dempf.

Why: DELETE! entails a unique cooperation of all resident shopkeepers with a spectacular art project, a cooperation that has been made possible by the shopping street management unit of the Vienna Economic Chamber. For a period of two weeks, the entrepreneurs will renounce their identities to become part of a large-scale installation.

How: Vogl used a Fuji S2, Nikkor 10.5mm FF Fisheye mounted on his lightweight panohead. The underexposed RAW-mode source images were converted with Fuji's RAW converter. After applying a custom contrast curve to retrieve shadows, the images were processed with the usual PTGui/Autopano/Enblend workflow.
Email Bernhard Vogl: bvogl[at]gmx[dot]at