Despite being meek and bookish, in high school I—like many other adolescent, suburban adopters of urban trends—developed a graffiti tag. Never possessing the gall to emblazon a wall with aerosol, I satisfied my rebellious urges by hastily scrawling it on desks and in bathroom stalls with a ballpoint pen. When I finally found enough of myself to disengage from Scarborough’s dominating hiphop culture, such adventures in petty vandalism went the way of my FUBU hoodies and Tupac CDs. The city was safe. That is, until myself and three other classmates found ourselves tasked with launching an ad campaign as an end-of-term project for The Discourse of Advertising, a fourth year course at the University of Waterloo.
The ultimate aim of the campaign was to drive traffic to a website, which features a preview of artist Dane Watkins’ online Moral Meter, by any means necessary. We needed to devise a means to capture and hold the attention of masses of typically attention-deficit people. It had to be daring, it had to be compelling, and it had to be cheap. So, we grabbed some paper, and set to work: folding origami cranes. Enlisting the help of our devotees and debtors, we made close to a thousand to disseminate throughout campus and in nearby cities such as London and Toronto.
Private Scrawls in Public Stalls 