Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Crush up chalk, adding charcoal powder to make the color darker if you want. Spray adhesive across the site, then put your stencil on it. Roll a paint roller in the chalk dust, and then across your stencil. This works best for large designs without much detail; it creates a temporary image that will wash off easily.

Once you've gotten familiar with the little ones, you can make a stencil one hundred feet long! Get a roll of painters' drop paper of that length, and cut letters and designs into it. Get a can or three of "mis-mixed" paint at any local hardware store (these are cheaper than other paint, or free), and a broad paint roller. Late one night, with three people for maximum speed, deploy the stencil on a concrete surface: one person un-Stencillng rolling it, one person rolling the paint over it, and the third person rolling up the paper 518 behind them. Engage lookouts if you have a couple more people interested. Provided

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the fire department isn't called in to wash the paint away before it dries (as happened to the feminists who tried this in Boston a number of years ago), there will be an exciting new message to the world downtown?and another message inside of it: pubHc space can be reclaimed.

You can also use stencils to print designs on paper or fabric, where screenprinting would be too involved: use a sponge to apply the appropriate paint through a stencil onto your material. You can mix a tactile medium in equal parts with acryhc paint to print on clothing.

You can make a potato into a stamper by cutting a design into it in reverse? presto, a disposable woodcut.

You can use a projector or make a device to project messages or images onto the sides of big buildings, to get a point across without actually touching them. A similar device, on a smaller scale, could be used to comment on Hollywood movies during sequences that are patently untrue.

Stenciling 519

Stickering

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You can make short-lived paper stickers out of address labels with a computer printer, or save money on the upscale version by screenprinting vinyl sticker sheets yourself, but there are craftier options. Stickers can be obtained for free from a number of sources?try the post ofRce, for starters?and if you don't want your design to integrate the original content, just cover them in a coat of white paint. Designs can be stenciled or screenprinted on such stickers, or just scrawled if you're lazy. If you want to get really fancy, form a long piece of stiff wire into an image or word in script, cut open a shoelace on one end and pull it over the wire, and dip it in paint?the shoelace will absorb paint, enabling you to use the wire as a stamper. Clear packing tape can be put on any paper stickers to make them more waterproof and durable.

Vinyl stickers look fancy, but can be easy to remove. To make removal more difficult, make a grid of slices across each sticker once it is applied, so it can only come off in tiny pieces.

Clear adhesive envelopes can be obtained free at unmanned Federal Express stations; you can put them up on the walls of city streets, corporate elevators, or gas station bathrooms with secret instructions or maps to buried treasure inside.

Stickers can go anywhere graffiti would, and have the advantages of looking more official and taking less time to deploy. Utilize stop signs (to call for opposition to the outrage of your choice), dead end signs (to do the same), telephones ("this phone is tapped"), vending machines and the like ("out of order"), newspaper dispensers ("lies"), gas pumps

("certified ioo% Iraqi blood"), trash cans ("ballot box," with an arrow), advertisements at bus stops (add speech bubbles), automobile bumpers ("ask me why I'm destroying the environment"), food in grocery stores ("WARNING: this package contains the slowly rotting corpse of a tortured, deformed bird"), automatic teller machines ("can you buy freedom?"), over gas tank caps on cars (a sticker of the earth, which must be torn to access the tank), elevators (duphcate the emergency warning: "don't wait for emergency take steps!" with an image of a figure running up the stairs with fire), anywhere people might forget they live in panopticon ("you are under surveillance").

For maximum impact, pick a certain theme and target and get a few friends together to cover an entire area in a matter of hours; immediately followdng a certain election, a team in a large city changed all the street signs on Bush Stieet to read Puppet Street, to name one example.