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Project Postergasm contains over a hundred funny, surreal, absurd, or provocative posters designed to transform your neighborhood into a cooler place. When you walk around the block, don’t you want to see humor, art, or absurdity? Take an active hand in shaping the spaces we share.

Some people treat Postergasm as a personal pilgrimage, a derive, or a meditative journey through the psychogeography of your neighborhood. To others, it’s an great excuse to walk around in meatspace and do something silly.

Now there are jokes and beauty and nonsense all over the place – and it’s not even trying to sell you something. The public space seems fresh, playful, like creative people live there.  The next day, you take a tour of the neighborhood to see how much of your handiwork remains, and it’s all been taken down! Why is this? And what can you do about it?

People in your neighborhood are running variations of a “cleaning up the neighborhood” program. The first step is to understand their motivation. Step two is to identify your posters to them as things they don’t have to “clean up”.

Let’s take a look at a few of the possible motivations for taking down your posters.

1. “I’m beautifying the neighborhood / cleaning up vandalism.” People operating on this meme are usually either concerned citizens or city workers who feel responsible for the neighborhood. This isn’t a bad meme in of itself. You are probably operating on a similar idea – actively modify your environment to make it feel like home. In this case, your opponent has associated your posters with vandalism and graffiti — to them they must seem like meaningless intrusions which impact the space’s beauty.

One way to attack this meme is to make them associate your posters with “Fine Art”. Try printing out famous and beautiful images which people associate with the word “art”, like the Mona Lisa or Monet’s Starry Night.  If your opponent is engaged in “beautifying the neighborhood”, they may not be motivated to take down something they find beautiful. If you find that posters of beauty stay up longer than other posters, you’ve found the winning hand. Spend a few weeks putting up these “obvious art” posters. The goal is to get your opponent to associate “those things stapled to trees” with “fine art”. Then gradually fade back to your favorites.

2. “It’s my job” – Often, the person taking down your posters works for the city. They could be a parking meter reader or an employee of city sanitation.  In this case, they are running a program designed to sort “authorized” and “unauthorized” modifications of the environment.  Your posters may have much better longevity if they masquerade as something which is Authorized, Approved, or Official. Often, all this takes is some official sounding language and iconography designed to confuse or mislead your opponent. Framed properly, people might be afraid that they’ll get in trouble for taking your posters down.

The words “Official” “Approved”, and “Authorized” are wonderful magic words for subversion. Darth Cupcake, of Boston, created these great stickers to help disguise posters as an approved municipal art project. If you create your own, try including language or images specific to your location, such as the name of your city or the state seal. An expiration date (Do not remove until May 1st) can help too.

3. “This doesn’t belong.” - People operating on this idea see your posters as abnormal and therefore bad. This is a version of “Beautifying the neighborhood” that prizes normality. Sometimes this program is run because people don’t understand the posters. Other times it’s just because the posters look out of place.

The best way to address this people is persistence. After one of your posters gets taken down, put another one in its place. Focus on posters which are funny or create a positive experience for the person that sees them. Eventually, people will get bored fighting a losing battle and let them stay. Or, in a best case scenario, they’ll actually start to appreciate them.

Above all, experiment. Posters may stay on one tree for weeks. Posters stapled to the tree next to it may be removed immediately. Through trial and error, you will eventually learn the rules and quirks unique to your neighborhood.