VIA WIRED

Vessel esoterica Skullphone (as exclusively profiled here by me) is currently in New York but before he left he made sure to leave a bunch of digital billboards blinking skullphones to keep the meme alive. Immediately, ridiculous speculation that “18-year-old graffiti artist” Skullphone “hacked into” the ClearChannel infranet/matrix/mainbrain/salesnexus metastatized from blog to blog—all with no claims made or verified by Skullphone himself—and that was fun until today when the blog world painfully self-corrected and figured out that Skullphone simply paid for the billboard space himself. Now they say: ” Skull Phone A Sellout, Paid Clear Channel!”

However—serious students of cellular phrenology may appreciate the post-billboard turmoil as much as billboards themselves. Who said Skullphone was a hacker? And why did they want him to be? Said Skull during a conversation on how he much prefers to poster only abandoned buildings, instead of making messes some unlucky business owner has to repair, and how he’s seeking new venues for Skullphoning:

“More and more I feel like I’m being shut out of my own creative environment—streets aren’t inspiring anymore. [...] Now it’s a more scripted environment. Downtown Disney meets Los Angeles. Plus it’s hard to wheatpaste on stucco!”

And then a billboard-specific insight for you, too:

“You ever see the Oh, God! movie series? I remember seeing that trilogy and how he was looking for God because God had decided he was over the world, and so the kid was depressed, and he put up signs—like billboards over Australia and China—that said, ‘Oh God, Where Are Thou?’ It’s kind of like that.”

Tags: skullphone