A Street Artist’s Guide to Megacorps

The first time somebody paid me to paint a wall, they asked for a bird.

Big wings. Bright colors. Something the kids could see from the tram. I spent three nights on it, and for a month people used it to give directions. Turn left at the bird. Meet you under the bird. Somebody left flowers there for a woman I never met.

Then the advertising lease changed hands. They painted over it with a smiling family holding breakfast products.

The family was taller than the bird. Apparently that made it an improvement.

You can learn plenty about the megacorps from a financial feed. I learned them by watching what happened to walls.

Find out who owns the view

Welcome to the Sixth World. Magic came back, dragons went into business, and the people selling you a better tomorrow acquired most of the places where you might stand to discuss it. In Seattle, you can spend a whole day moving between corporate interests without once stepping into a corporate lobby.

The megacorporations are businesses large enough to shape the lives around them: work, food, entertainment, the equipment in your body, the information in front of your eyes. The biggest are called the Big Ten. You hear the names so often that eventually they start sounding like weather.

They aren’t weather. Somebody approves the budget.

Some hire shadowrunners when they want a job done without their name attached. That’s a shadowrun: work whose employer would prefer to remain a matter of speculation. An artist should appreciate the arrangement. They want their logo everywhere except on the invoice for the damage.

A company doesn’t need its own name above every door. Follow enough little brands and you start finding the same big names behind them. The advertisement, the shop selling the advertised thing, and the people paying to remove your objection may be closer acquaintances than they appear.

Before you plan a piece, watch the block. Who uses it? Who cleans it? Who’s allowed to sit down? A plaza can look public until somebody decides you’ve been there long enough.

And look twice: once at the concrete, once through the augmented-reality layer. That blank wall might already be carrying a perfume campaign, a recruitment pitch, and a woman telling you that you’ve almost earned a discount. Take your glasses off and enjoy the unusual sensation of seeing an unoccupied surface.

Ares would like you to feel protected

Ares Macrotechnology is an easy name to learn. Arms manufacture gives a company a certain confidence in its lettering.

Ares sells the reassuring side of force. Somewhere in the picture, somebody dependable has the right equipment and knows what to do. If you’re frightened enough, you can look at an advertisement for a weapon and feel as though someone has offered to tuck you in.

I respect that as composition. I have other feelings about the business.

When I sketch an Ares advertisement, I pay attention to where the danger sits. Usually beyond the frame. The customer gets to imagine it. A useful response is to widen the picture: include the people standing outside the protected doorway, or the street that disappears behind the heroic figure’s shoulder.

You don’t have to paint a skull on everything. Sometimes you just have to finish the background.

The Ares shirt at D20Threads says “Security Through Strength.” Good short line. Fits comfortably across a chest. On a wall, I’d want enough room underneath to ask whose security we were discussing.

I’d also want someone who knew me to have a copy of the sketch.

Renraku keeps a tidy frontage

You can admire a mark without wanting its owner to notice you.

Renraku Computer Systems has the sort of compact, angular identity that makes a designer put down their drink and study the spacing. It looks settled. It knows where it belongs. By comparison, my handwriting usually looks as though it has just been asked to leave.

Renraku takes honor seriously, especially when explaining itself. Listen carefully to who gets to define an insult.

For an artist, the useful distinction is between being visible and being welcome. A corporation can encourage a beautifully maintained streetscape while taking a very narrow view of who may contribute to it. Your work might be good. That won’t make it part of the approved frontage.

This is also where people get romantic about surveillance. They imagine one camera, one bored guard, one moment when nobody is looking.

I assume the city has a better memory than I do. There are cameras, drones, people with recording eyes, and perfectly ordinary passersby sharing what they’ve seen. A picture can travel a long way before you get home. Being admired and being identified can begin with the same upload.

So when a younger painter asks whether I think a certain Renraku wall is worth it, I ask what they want the piece to say.

“Look how close I got” is an expensive message for such a small audience.

Aztechnology is already in the kitchen

Ares wants to help with your fears. Aztechnology is comfortable being part of your ordinary afternoon.

That’s what makes it interesting. Consumers can like the company while runners lower their voices at its name. Both groups may be buying dinner from the same shelves.

People expect a sinister corporation to advertise sinister things. Aztechnology understands how much more useful it is to seem familiar. Warm colors. Food. A promise that somebody has thought about the household before you had time to.

The shirt’s stepped red emblem and rising sun do that work neatly. Underneath sits “Harvesting Tomorrow.” I can enjoy the print and still wonder who is expected to do the harvesting.

As a painter, I have another problem with corporate heritage campaigns. Symbols have people attached to them. Stories, ceremonies, grandparents who remember a version without a sponsor. An advertising department can borrow the shape and discard everyone who knows what it meant.

That doesn’t give me permission to borrow it back for my own convenience. If I don’t know a symbol’s history, I ask somebody who does before using it to make a point about a corporation. The neighbors deserve more consideration than the marketing department gave them.

And if a runner tells you there’s something worse behind the cheerful campaign, you don’t have to paint every rumor as established fact. Paint the question you can stand behind. You may have to answer for it yourself.

The company that likes your work

Horizon is the one that makes me check the message twice.

Media and persuasion are its territory. It understands that people listen differently when a message arrives through someone they already like. Sometimes that person is a singer. Sometimes it’s a neighborhood painter who has been complaining about corporate advertising all week.

Especially that painter, if the campaign is any good.

An offer arrives. They love the raw quality. They want the neighborhood’s authentic voice. There’s a fee, materials, proper lighting. For once, someone is willing to pay for all the colors.

Read what happens after delivery. Can they crop it? Put it behind a product? Use your name? Keep using it after you’ve said something inconvenient? Being paid fairly for the painting doesn’t settle what they’ll do with the painter.

I’m not telling you never to take a commission. Paint costs money. So does breakfast. I’ve painted cheerful things on request and spent the payment without a crisis of conscience.

But I keep a copy of the agreement beside the sketch. It helps me remember which bits of my independence I actually sold.

Spinrad Global approaches from the other end of the studio. Fashion, appetite for the new, the pleasure of looking as though tomorrow has already happened to you. You can fight a brand like that for months and then see something uncomfortably like your work worn by somebody who has never visited your block.

Keep your old photographs. The date matters when someone calls your own style derivative.

Who gets to belong in the picture?

Evo makes the body part of the conversation. Changing what people can be is a different proposition when the audience includes elves, orks, trolls, dwarfs, humans, and neighbors who fit those labels imperfectly.

I pay attention to Evo campaigns because a picture of the future has to decide who gets included. Who stands in the middle? Who gets a name? Who’s there to demonstrate that the company has remembered everybody?

Then I look at the actual doorway beside the advertisement.

If your mural celebrates the neighborhood, give the neighbors that much attention. Ask the troll whose head you keep putting outside the frame. Ask the dwarf who can’t read your lettering over the crowd. Ask whether the person you’re using as a symbol would rather be painted getting on with their day.

Shiawase offers another kind of belonging: the weight of an institution, with corporate power and Japan’s political life close together. It makes me think about the difference between having a place and being expected to know it.

You can paint a family as a collection of people who care for each other. You can also paint one as a seating arrangement nobody is allowed to change. Watch which version a sponsor approves.

Neither company can answer those questions for the people on your street. Neither can I. That’s why I try to leave enough time in a commission to listen before I start drawing faces.

Leave room for the owners you can’t see

Mitsuhama is a reminder that the company name on a computer doesn’t tell you the limits of the business. Technology and magic both have corporate research budgets. The hand moving your image across a screen and the hand studying unseen forces can belong to the same organization.

I’m fond of paint partly because I can tell when it’s wet. Other parts of this profession have less considerate warning signs. A wall isn’t safe because you understand the camera, and a digital canvas isn’t free because you can’t see its landlord.

Wuxing makes me think about flows: power, influence, the things that move through a city while you’re busy looking at its towers. An artist follows foot traffic and sightlines. A megacorp has rather more to direct toward its own front door.

When you’re deciding who a piece will reach, look beyond the largest screen. Follow the morning queue, the delivery entrance, the stretch where people wait out the rain. The best place for a picture may be somewhere the advertising buyers have decided nobody important stands.

Those people still have eyes.

And then there’s Saeder-Krupp. Enormous corporate power, with a great dragon behind it. You can spend an evening making elaborate metaphors about greed and treasure, or accept that the Sixth World sometimes saves you the trouble.

I draw dragons badly. This has so far spared me a number of artistic decisions.

The more useful lesson is scale. You aren’t going to outspend any of these companies. They can buy a taller building and put a bigger picture on it. Decide what you can offer the person on the pavement that the biggest picture can’t.

Something worth coming back to

For me, it’s usually a place.

A portrait people recognize. A joke that belongs to the block. A bird over a tram stop, painted large enough for a child to give directions by.

Get the wall owner’s permission when you can, and ask the people who have to live beside it even when the paperwork doesn’t require you to. A shopkeeper’s shutter is their morning’s work. A memorial has people coming back to it. Neither is an empty canvas simply because a corporation would treat it as one.

If you want a corporate mark you can take home, D20Threads has the Ares, Renraku, and Aztechnology shirts linked above. I understand the attraction. Sometimes it’s the lettering. Sometimes it’s a joke shared with the right stranger. Wearing the logo doesn’t oblige you to believe the advertisement.

You may still get asked to explain it over a drink.

My bird turned up again, incidentally. Somebody had drawn a little version on a doorway a few streets away. Then another appeared beside a food queue. Different hands, different colors. One had far too many legs.

Nobody hired me to put those there. Nobody asked which company owned the bird.

People just remembered where they’d seen it.