What do you get if you combine Guerrilla Gardening with Culture Jamming?

You get something like 'Tree in front of billboard' ('Boom voor billboard').

In discontent with the presence of bilboards in the urban landscape, Dutch artist Helmut Smits decided to take direct action in a creative way.

Instead of defacing the billboards, he dressed up as a city worker and planted a tree in front of one of them in broad daylight.

• www.helmutsmits.nl / (via)

Humor and creativity often plays a central role when civil disobedience movements develop their tools and tactics.

Sometimes these tools even turn into works of art, such as 'Suited for Subversion' developed by Ralph Borland as a part of his Master's Degree at New York University.

Inspired by notorious activist-networks such as Ya Basta and Tute Bianche, Borland created a bubble-suit shaped as a big red heart, designed to protect the wearer at large scale street protests.

The suit - which can be worn with our without clothes underneath - also monitors the wearer's pulse and projects an amplified heartbeat out of a speaker. Naturally, it's not really the material itself but the obvious vulnerability and self-irony that is most likely to pacify the opposition and win over public support.

Suited for Subversion took part in SAFE: Design Takes on Risk at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2005/2006.

Related: Surveillance Camera Players + Hello Mr.President.

• www.ralphborland.net/s4s/

A smart way of keeping shoes organized. Simply made with white tape.

Germany is a big country with a relatively short coastline.

Consequently, if Germans want to spend their vacation at the seaside they often travel to neighbouring countries such as Denmark, a much smaller country - but surrounded by the sea.

So, as a gift to the German people, Danish artist Nikolaj Recke recently travelled to Germany's northeastern coast, where he dug into the beach shore to extend the total sum of German coastline by 10 meters.

Documentation of the intervention - or enlargement if you will - is currently on exhibit at the Thomas Rhebin Gallery in Köln.

• 10 Meters of Extended German Coastline

A few years ago, French artist Christophe Bruno created the Google AdWords Happening, in which he utilized the AdWords program to publish abstract poetry instead of ads. Google didn't find the happening appropriate hence, he got banned.

Last year Bruno's happening was followed up by GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, an artistic click-fraud scheme developed by Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico. GWEI turned Google's ubiquitous AdSense program against Google itself in order to draw public attention to the fact that Google's immense popularity constitutes a democratic paradox. The operation was quickly discovered and stopped by Google.

Now, US artist Cory Arcangel has added to the list of conceptual Google-ad hacks.

Arcangel recently put up a webpage containing the entire text from Kurt Cobain's suicide note and paired it with Google AdSense.

Naturally, the text-ads generated by Cobain's suicide note are totally absurd and so, the site demonstrates just how clueless AdSense is despite Google's claim that 'AdSense can deliver relevant ads because Google understand the meaning of a webpage'.

• beigerecords.com/cory/kurt

The International Tree Climbing Day is an annual event that has taken place in selected trees since 2003.

The event is organized by Irational - a group of international artist (primarily British) who came together 10 years ago around the domain irational.org.

The next ITCD probably wont happen before 2007 but if you want to learn more about the work and mindset of Irational, you should take a look at the upcomming exhibition "The Wonderful World of irational.org. Tools, Techniques and Events 1996-2006".

The exhibition is organized by Hartware MedienKunstVerein and takes place in Dortmund from August 30 to October 29.

• Hartware MedienKunstVerein • International Tree Climbing Day

Improv Everywhere is a group of agents (pranksters) based in NYC who organize missions (happenings) in public space. Their intent is to bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales and give strangers a story they can tell for the rest of their lives.

One of the group's latest missions took place in a Best Buy store and was carried out by more than 80 agents.

The group met at Best Buy, all wearing blue polo shirts almost identical to the store's uniform where after they entered the store and began circulating.

They did not claim to work at the store, however when a customer mistook them for an employee, they did their best to help out...

Extensive documentation is available online.

• Improv Everywhere

Credits Neverending is an interactive TV program that contains no other content than a continuously growing list of end-credits.

The credits are written by attentive viewers who - somewhere between the lines - are invited to interact and submit their own credit lines from a website.

The program was created for the Finnish TV channel Dina and developed as a part of a project that seeks to produce intentionally boring TV.

Related: The Million Dollar Movie Project

• Credits Neverending

Scrollbars is a series of installations and physical scrollbar-representations created by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte.

According to Jan Robert, most of us consider the scrollbar to be a virtual object - but in use it triggers reactions such as frustration, which suggests a subconscious acceptance of the inherent 'reality' of these objects.

Jan Robert Leegte has been exploring the sculptural properties of internet browsers and software, such as scrollbars, buttons and table borders since 1997.

Related: Graphical User Interface + Analogue Screenshots

• Scrollbar Compositions

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things is a highly original research organization based in Boston, whose mission is to invent and distribute new practices of political engagement in everyday life.

This June, they are inviting members of the public to join them in a series of renaming expeditions in Cambridge, which will result in the publication of a new map of The City Formerly Known as Cambridge.

To rename a street, park, square or other part of Cambridge, MA, simply attend an expedition and fill out a form to justify your reasons for renaming.

The first expedition takes place on June 1st at the public opening ceremony of the newly redesigned Porter Square plaza. As soon as it is officially named, it will be renamed!

• Initiative for the Renaming of Names in Cambridge