Reading Phillipe Duhamel's most recent Intertactica blog post, I was particularly interested in the following case example:

4. Help across borders. Imagine an instrument that would help migrants and refugees navigate their way across borders, using their phone’s global positioning (GPS) information to show them not only the safest route and where water and shelter can be found, but also which itinerary offers the best scenery! That’s what an “artivist” project called the Transborder Immigrant Tool hopes to achieve.

What a beautiful idea! I encourage you to visit those two links and find out more about this interesting project. I was inspired to find out more about "artivism" (a portmanteau of "art" and "activism"), a recent movement which goes beyond traditional "politcal art" to find new and creative ways of subverting and reframing the furniture of our daily lives. A common artivist technique is "subvertising", an anti-consumerist approach which modifies publicly visible corporate advertising to rebound the message back at the corporation. "Culture jamming" can also include reclaiming public spaces to send a new message :

(found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Liberation_Front)

Other great examples of artivism:

-Will St Leger's "100 Landmines in Dublin", in which enamel plates made to look like landmines were placed around public parks, in order to get people to think about what it might feel like to live in a place littered with mines. (see www.woostercollective.com)

-Posters and paint on Greenwich Village adboards: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E3DE113AF934A35751C1A9659C8B63

In the words of artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, talking about more traditional political art: “To prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public. [...] Art in general seems to be a very useful artifice. Film, theater, painting, literature, media art—all of this is a very good conduit for transmitting the things which people would rather not hear or see. This is a possibility for transmitting something uncanny, something that ought to be hidden but comes to light.”

I think this can apply equally to artivism and culture jamming, which highlight the artifice of public products and investigate new, and perhaps powerful, conduits of communication.