AddArt: Banish Ads and Enjoy Contemporary Art Instead
For many Adblock Plus is a must-have. Indeed, it’s the most popular Firefox add-on, with over 4 million downloads. Once you’re accustomed to blocking web ads it can be quite shock to go back to seeing them again — like finding your favorite scenic overlook suddenly cluttered with countless billboards.
But while AdBlock Plus is great for stopping those annoying Flash banner ads, what if you did something more interesting than just blocking them?
That’s the idea behind a new Firefox extension, Add-Art, which works in conjunction with AdBlock Plus to replace ads with selected artwork from contemporary artists.
AddArt takes AdBlock Plus to the next level by turning your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit a site, ahem, littered with ads, Add-Art replaces them with images by a young contemporary artist.
AddArt uses AdBlock Plus, in fact it’s bundled with AddArt, so if you already have a white list of acceptable ads set up, AddArt won’t block those sites.
According to the site, every two weeks AddArt will include 5-8 artists selected by the curators. Given the size constraints of standard ad banners, images will be cropped, or artists can make custom size works for the project. One artist will be shown per page and artists can target sites (such as every ad on Webmonkey.com).
Given the popularity of AdBlock Plus, if AddArt could grab even a small sliver of its market share it would represent hundreds of thousands eyeballs — something most contemporary artists can only dream of.
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re looking for something more exciting than white space and collapsed divs, take AddArt for a test drive. Unfortunately at the moment AddArt doesn’t support Firefox 3, but the project is open source so if you’d like to contribute head over to the site and see what you can do.
