ACTIVISM Activism beyond the protest that what D.O.T.S. is all about. A protest /rally can be a beautiful event but it is only an event. It has a beginning, middle and end. You'll meet good people doing good things. But people may feel lost at the end of the day and want to do something but they don't know where to start. That's where god becomes involved. Yes, god. If you don't know what god I'm writing about, it is a spray can. Yes, GOD IS A SPRAY CAN. Of course, there are other things that people can do before or after a protest. But I'm not here to write about that. I'm here to prophesize the great destruction and reconstruction of society. Through the fumes I have seen what to write. Street Art is for all who happen to see it and for those who want to join. If used correctly, it can reach the masses more than a protest ever will. GETTING UP One night of activity on the streets will never add up to the impact of a protest, but constant organized activity on the streets will blow any protest out of the water. Becoming organized about street art isn't that hard to do. First, look for a high level of foot traffic (this means the parts of the city where you see thousands of people walking every day). This kind of area is a great place to begin to become noticed. Places with high foot traffic during the day and light and low foot traffic during the night are prefect for fame. I'm going to give my definition of fame here: what I mean is that people will see your work. I don't mean people worshipping you as an idol. Grabbing a map of the city is a good place to start to see all the different areas you want to do. Mark the places that you know have a high level of foot traffic, then try to connect the areas with a main street. Once this is done, it will seem like our art is everywhere. Like I said before, one night will never add up, but every day will. Every day? YES! When I was a writer, I set a minimum of 3 tags a day; that's 21 a week, 1092 a year. When I switched to stickers, it changed to 5 days a week, 5 stickers a day, 25 a week and 1300 a year. In a night you can easily do 25 stickers - 5 stickers is just minimum, a lot more can be done. I feel it's important that street artists set minimums for a week so that the activity continues. Putting up stickers is a good medium to start with. At first, go with paper stickers (photo copies). You can buy 100 sheets (8 1/2 x 11) of sticky back for $20 or so at office supply stores. For sticker paper with copies and cuts the cost is about $30 to $40 for 400 to 600 stickers. Paper stickers do not last as long as vinyl stickers. Printing about 1200 to 1500 stickers costs about $175 going a print shop. The yield of stickers all depends on your layout. You also can go the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) route. Stickers are great for foot traffic but are not so great for car traffic. For car traffic the design needs to be big and bold and quick to read. Cars are in motion. To have a one or two paragraph statement on a poster for a viewer in a car to read will never work. Looking at billboards is great place gain design influences about what works and what doesn't. You can grab a bunch of 11x17 (11x17 is most common large paper format in copy stores) posters and tape them to together to cover as much wall space as possible. After taping the posters together, roll them up and unroll them onto the wall. This technique is the quickest way to get the posters up. On the streets, time is everything. The more time spent doing the action, the more likely you can be caught. Keeping exposure time down is a must. Quick hits and lots of them are the best way to get a message out. If you want bigger posters, you can enlarge them at most copy shops. Their cost is no less than $2.00 and up to whatever they charge by the square foot. The low cost route is to get a pad of newspaper 18x24 or larger; the cost is about $10 for a 100 sheets. Then cut a stencil and spray paint onto the newspaper or cut the stencil on wax paper, tape the stencil onto a silk screen and print them. This is the cheapest way I know of how to mass produce posters. The cheapest way to get a message across to the masses is just grabbing some spray paint and freehand your work. Doing street art for car traffic usually means foot traffic will notice it also. But most likely the buffers (street art removal) will too. That's why the action needs to be constant. To organize a group of people to hit over 200 posters in a night that covers the whole city is great. But if is an action isn't followed up, all your work be gone in a month if not sooner. The only way to beat the buff is to be more active than the buff. A person can just put in a day in a week in putting stuff up and still get fame. But the day would need to be at least 8 hours or more of work. A person can easily do street art every so often, but it will never be considered up. The idea of D.O.T.S. is for people not in the "seen" to notice the messages on the streets. The only way to do this is to battle the buff . The buff is constant, so our actions should also be constant. Spray paint is the easiest tool to start with whether you're free handing or using a stencil. Stencils take time to cut; but once there cut, you can transform yourself into a walking printing press. As I wrote before, you can also use these same stencils to create posters to paste up later. I invite all readers to become D.O.T.S. and to write their opinions on the walls and streets of our cities. Do this action every day for a month before deciding that it is not for you. Create art work of resistance against capitalism and share it with the masses. By no means do I believe that this act alone will dismantle the system of capitalism, but it will play a vital role in the people's minds that they are not alone in believing that this system is shit. go