Add-Art

Add-Art (2008) is a browser extension that replaces online advertising with art. Instead of banner ads, you see rotating curated art shows.

The New York Times homepage in May 2007, with banner ads on the left and the same ad slots showing ART placeholders on the right Steve's mock-up of the New York Times with ads, and with Add-Art. Image by Steve Lambert, 2007.

Created by Steve Lambert with support from Eyebeam and Rhizome. I got involved through Steve and the Eyebeam crowd, and was one of the open source developers who helped build it in 2008.

The extension works alongside Adblock Plus, but instead of leaving blank space where ads were, it fills that space with contemporary art. New shows came out every two weeks, each with 5 to 8 artists picked by emerging and established curators.

How it works

Every time you visit a website with ads, you see art instead. The New York Times, the weather, your email — suddenly your browser becomes a gallery.

A movie review page with its ad slots filled by Hiroshige's woodblock print Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge Add-Art filling a news site's ad slots with Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge (1857, public domain). Screenshot by Steve Lambert, 2008.

History

Steve had the idea years earlier and asked programmer friends to build it. They told him it was possible and that they would not help. He got further as a fellow in Eyebeam’s OpenLab, where Evan Harper answered his email with “Can you give me a week?” and built a prototype that swapped ads for bald eagles and American flags. That’s from Steve’s own history of the project, which is worth a read.

Steve used the prototype to apply for a Rhizome Commission, and Rhizome members and jurors picked it for $5,000. Wladimir Palant, who made Adblock Plus, wrote the first version. Steve spent the grant on pizza and beer for weekly developer meetups at Eyebeam.

May 2007: The New York Times wrote it up while it was still a test version.
2008: My commits run from January to September and are mostly plumbing: renaming the old “artbanners” code to addart, fixes to the build script, a hacky one-artist-per-page, and tagging releases from 0.4.4 through 0.5.3.
May 2008: Steve presented it at a Rhizome Commissions panel at the New Museum on May 22, as part of the release. Becky Stern at Make and Bruce Sterling at Wired picked it up.
June 2008: Steve offered $100 for the best remix of his screencast. I made a rap one in ten minutes.

Steve's intro screencast for Add-Art. Vimeo dates the upload to May 2008, but the video now shows a later Add-Art 2.0-era release, not the 2008 screencast I remixed. Video by Steve Lambert.

November 2008: Tobias Leingruber started Artzilla at the end of the month, and I contributed. It was a home for Firefox art add-ons that Mozilla usually refused to list. In January 2009 we presented it on a Firefox art panel at ROFLThing NYC with Steve.
February 2009: A second wave of press. The Next Web and Lifehacker covered it, and Jenna Wortham at the New York Times quoted me saying it had more than 25,000 active users.
September 2010: The Creators Project featured it in a roundup of browser art, next to my Google Alarm.

The add-art.org Shows page in 2010, a grid of recent curated shows The add-art.org Shows page, with a new curated show every couple of weeks. Artworks belong to their artists. Screenshot by Steve Lambert, 2010.

Steve wrote the whole story up as “Add-Art: Sharing, Freedom, and Beer,” chapter 16 of the Routledge book NetWorks: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. It’s free to read on his site.

Add-Art 2.0

The 2.0 release in January 2015, with thanks to Corey Tegeler, let users choose between art sources:

The Brooklyn Museum
Eyebeam
Kadist Foundation
NASA
Rhizome

Add-Art 2.0 settings window listing art sources Rhizome, Kadist, NASA and Eyebeam, with a NASA astronaut photo preview The Add-Art 2.0 settings window, where you pick an art source. Screenshot by Steve Lambert, 2015.

The New York Times homepage in January 2015 with Add-Art messages in the ad slots saying press the A button in the toolbar to choose some art Add-Art 2.0 on a fresh install, before you pick an art source. Screenshot by Steve Lambert, 2015.

Addendum

In May 2016, with support from Kadist, the project was rebuilt as Addendum, a complete overhaul for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Addendum replaces web ads with visual essays by artists, and lets you make and share your own. Steve credits Kadist, Joseph Del Pesco, Oliver Wise and Corey Tegeler.

Addendum promo image: “Replace web ads with visual essays by artists” over a black-and-white historical photo of a crowd Addendum promo image by Steve Lambert and Kadist, 2016.

Contributors

The original credits list Steve Lambert, Wladimir Palant, myself, Matt Katz, Tobias Leingruber, Ethan Ham, Michael Mandiberg, Jeff Crouse, Sean Salmon, Evan Harper, Michelle Kempner, Dan Phiffer, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Alyssa Wright and Hana Newman. Later code came from Ben Bonfil, Corey Tegeler and Oliver Wise, per the GitHub history.