Our art exhibition Billboard Dystopia toured the UK in 2025 and is available for conferences, festivals and events in 2026 and 2027. If you’d like to discuss booking the installation, please get in touch via hello [at[ adfreecities.org.uk. You can see previous outings on our events page.
To focus attention on the tactics deployed in the advertising of major oil companies, Adfree Cities has created a new art installation, Billboard Dystopia. Made from re-engineered e-waste, Billboard Dystopia is an anti-advertising billboard which challenges the power of commercial advertising and corporate greenwash in our public spaces. It is a unique, freestanding visual art experience, which hosts a range of bespoke and curated content addressing the volume, nature and impact of harmful advertising – especially by oil majors.
“[Fossil fuel companies] have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men fuelling the madness.”
UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, June 2024
Billboard Dystopia has been commissioned by Adfree Cities as a public engagement tool building on the success of the Hell Bus tour with Darren Cullen in 2023. It has been designed and built by Bristol-based engineers and technicians Louie Norwood and Simon Langley: with the bespoke digital content created by Wake The Tiger’s Creative Producer, Summer Dean.
Billboard Dystopia is a useful visual installation at conferences and events and can be supported by workshops on the advertising-related topics led by Adfree Cities staff which engage citizens in discussion about how we build sustainable futures beyond consumerism to meet our needs, and how to create urban spaces that centre community connection, solidarity, public art and access to nature.
LAUNCH AT SPARKS, BROADMEAD in BRISTOL, January 2025
Billboard Dystopia began its UK tour in January 2025 with a residency at sustainable department store Sparks, which is sited in the old Marks and Spencer premises in Broadmead shopping centre. The screen spent several months in the store until the end of April 2025, chiming perfectly with the climate-conscious ethos of the store and its tenants.
Adfree Cities used our launch event to promote the work of our local Adblock group, which has stopped over 150 digital advertising screens from being built in Bristol alone since forming in 2017. Our launch event included the following speakers:
- Robbie Gillett from Adblock Bristol, discussing the development of surveillance advertising in public space – including how this fossil fuel interests are utilising this – and what we can do about it.
- Chloe Naldrett from Adfree Cities on what we can learn from the campaign against tobacco advertising in the 1980s and 1990s and why we need a similar national ban on fossil fuel company advertising.
- Rob Bryher, Bristol councillor for St George West discussing what could be done to improve Bristol Council’s current advertising and sponsorship policies on council-controlled ad spaces such as bus stops.
- Nicola Wilks (Adblock Bristol) on how residents are pushing for policy solutions at the local council and national government to create happier, healthier cities.
For more information about our launch event at Sparks, please see here.
BALSALL HEATH COMMUNITY FESTIVAL, BIRMINGHAM
Billboard Dystopia was invited to The Old Print Works in Balsall Heath for their monthly Second Saturday community festival in March 2025. The festival celebrates making, creativity, community, local culture and the arts, and was attended by individuals, families and groups from across South Birmingham. Adfree Cities ran a workshop targeted at supporting Adblock initiatives in the city and built some good connections with residents and local activists in the area.
SURVEILLANCE ADVERTISING
All around us, advertisers are building new digital advertising screens in our streets with facial detection capabilities that allow adverts to target particular demographics without our consent. Billboard Dystopia is equipped with cameras embedded into the unit and a new strand of content will be arriving soon which will reveal how commercial advertising units are able to process information about the public as they pass in order to target them with specific ads.
This content is being developed by Creative Technologists Coral Manton and Dave Webb, Lecturers in Creative Computing at Bath Spa University and will be live in the early summer of 2025. This strand of work is inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ and is intended to fascinate, entertain and appal audiences
“We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.”
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
UK TOUR 2025
Billboard Dystopia is now on tour, with visits to cities including Reading and Leeds, festivals including Lambeth Country Fair and Green Gathering in the summer, and visits to Manchester and Portsmouth in the autumn. These residencies will all be accompanied by events hosted in partnership with local Adblock groups, and talks to invited audiences of local elected officials and decision-makers to further conversation around a tobacco-style ban for high-carbon advertising by councils (following the example set by Edinburgh and Sheffield in 2024).
SOFT LAUNCH AND BETA TESTING AT FEARLESS CITIES, SHEFFIELD
The screen’s first outing was a test run at the Fearless Cities conference, held in 2024 at the University of Sheffield from 1 – 3 November. This was the first opportunity to experiment with transporting and installing the screen outside of the workshop where it was built, and to try early versions of the bespoke artwork designed for the screen.
We learnt a lot very quickly: far from being overwhelming, it is immediately possible to absorb storytelling content which is spread across the 12 screens, and the distance from which all screens can be viewed simultaneously is not as far as we had suspected. This opened up a wider range of possible venue options for the future. Feedback from our first audiences was incredibly positive, giving us the confidence to lean further into the bolder end of our bespoke artwork menu. Read more about our weekend at Fearless Cities here.