We live in a digital age where our algorithms relentlessly spoon feed us copious amounts of information. Faced with everything from mindless ‘AI slop’ to harrowing footage of war crimes that indiscriminately glare out of our screens, it feels increasingly difficult not to sink or to become numb to the disorientating absurdity of it all. Or, harder still, to filter out fact from fiction and pinpoint what really matters.
For activists fighting to make their causes heard, this poses immense challenges. Out of the struggle to break through the digital noise that bellows out at our fingertips has arisen, however, the readoption of material protest methods, most notably in what can be called ‘billboard activism’. Over the last few years there has been a resurgence in the billboard’s tactful weaponisation by activist groups, who have repeatedly proved it to be a powerful tool for resistance as it imposes itself on the day-to-day world that surrounds us. Taking lessons from the pre-internet culture jamming by groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front, contemporary activist groups like Led By Donkey’s and Everyone Hates Elon have utilised this form of guerilla campaigning to put their movements on local radars and to demand public attention beyond the social media battleground—after all, it is physically impossible to scroll past a ten-foot sign.
Given the significant clamp down on protest rights in recent years, both in the UK and internationally, to take to the streets to speak out is to actively place a target on your head. Even the simple act of holding a sign places you at risk (as of December 11th last year, over 2700 individuals had been arrested since July 2025 for protesting against the proscription of Palestine Action, the vast majority of these protests being peaceful). Billboard activism is therefore more than just an effective means of widening campaign reach to regain the attention of disengaged or understandably overwhelmed audiences; it is a uniquely safe method of doing so.
Greenpeace acknowledged this in their project with Amnesty International UK in July last year titled ‘They can’t arrest this billboard’, which saw Ocean Outcomes’ Loop Network transformed into what they described as ‘virtual protest spaces’. By virtually placing protesters behind the protective barrier of a screen, individuals were able to vocalise opposition to a number of issues from human rights to environmental abuses without the fear of the ‘very real’ and direct threat of arrest.
As strategic as it may be, billboard activism is not without its limitations. Boards are restricted by where they can physically be displayed, their materiality renders them vulnerable to vandalism, and they are, to an extent, restricted in the quantity of information they are able to provide. This is important when you consider that the most effective form of resistance is education, for it is the key to fostering public critical consciousness. Yet there is, unfortunately, only so much a billboard, and out-of-home media more generally, can teach you. Another method is needed.
The answer to this dilemma has been found in projection. Though not an entirely new form (with INFACT famously projecting ‘a running count of the number of children addicted to cigarettes’ onto New York’s Philip Morris building the night before the Great American Smokeout in 1994), its adoption as a protest tool appears to have taken off in recent years. Targeting locations such as the White Cliffs of Dover, HMP Pentonville, and the Houses of Parliament, Led By Donkey’s have projected mini documentary-esque exposé videos, democratising information and informing the public of the truth behind issues ranging from the relationship between the President of the United States and a convicted paedophile to bias at the BBC. In the last few weeks I have observed this strategy on a local level, most notably when Cambridge for Palestine, a self-defined ‘student-led coalition standing against Cambridge University’s complicity in apartheid and genocide’, projected demands for divestment directly onto the gate house of St John’s College, Cambridge.
Simple yet effective, location-specific projection is able to, as Beautiful Trouble eloquently words it, ‘shine a light on the opposition’ in a very literal sense. Projecting videos that are able to expose the factual realities of abuses at the hands of the organisations and individuals they target on their own turf is an act of defiance that entirely strips away the target’s agency—it’s much more difficult to put a stop to a projection than it is to tear down a billboard, even if it is only temporary.
Some may be quick to point out that this temporary nature, propounded by projection’s reliance on darkness, limits the audience to a few late-night passersby. Equally, given the issues with social media already outlined, the solution to the limited audience is not as simple as just releasing the videos online (instead of projecting them) and hoping they don’t drown in the algorithmic swamp.
And so, for these videos to reach their educative potential of providing the British public with honest information on issues such as the Epstein Files, government corruption, and the misrepresentation in mainstream media of the war crimes committed as part of the Gaza genocide, they have to foster engagement in digital spaces for that’s where the largest audience lies. They have to cut through the noise.
Projections are able to do this on account of the surprise that is stirred up when such infamous buildings and sites are seen to be, in effect, hijacked. Having ‘the story of Trump and Epstein’ blown up on the walls of Windsor Castle, to choose one example, creates the perfect conditions for the crucial viral moment. Without breaking criminal damage laws, the projection was able to ‘stain’ the royal walls with the deeply uncomfortable truth about their guest’s, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s, personal relationship with the convicted sex offender.
Whether observed first-hand or received through a screen, projections force people to stop walking or scrolling and instead to watch, listen, and learn. Yes, billboard activism is effective, but there is an undeniable educational potential and defiant visual power to projection.
It is beginning to feel cliché to talk again of a ‘post-truth’ environment, but it is the world we are facing. These activist groups realise that the only path to change lies in transparency, education, and fact. With legal barriers increasingly restricting protest rights, the adoption of simultaneously material and viral forms of resistance, namely projection, is proving to be a lifeline for those fighting to make their voices heard.
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