OTL Blog

Well before Time2Ad‘s giant billboard reared its obtrusive head on St-Laurent Boulevard, OTL’s Reclaim the Main campaign had been challenging corporate and monoculture intrusions our heritage site through culture jamming. Every summer during the street fairs we were greeted with a new corporate sponsor monopolizing a celebration that’s supposed to be for the people as [...]

On the occasion of today’s Quebec election and in honour of the difficulties Stephen Harper is presently facing in Ottawa, we present a mock press conference we performed with UTIL (l’Unité Théâtral d’Interventions Loufoques) on the back of a flatbed truck before an anti-war march in the freezing cold, March 2006. First, the guest of [...]

On Friday, OTL continued its Buy Nothing Day tradition of jamming the corporate monoculture and our consumer culture by going to the bank and the mall. In our scene, Mr. Monopoly (monocle, moustache, top hat and all) had just lost a bunch of money on the stock market and went looking for a handout with [...]

Last year, it was a clever, creative warning of what was to come if we didn’t curb our over-consumptive ways.  This year, it seems like the prophecy of the Shopocaypse is coming true, if you follow international business news, anyways What Would Jesus Buy is a film that chronicles NYC theatre activist Reverend Billy and [...]

Buy Nothing Day is an international challenge to our oversaturated, unsustainable consumer culture.  For the past five years, Optative Theatrical Laboratories has challenged this glut with guerilla theatre culture jams at places like McDonald’s, Starbucks and more recently Chartwells. Mass consumption wouldn’t be possible without the banks and this year, the greed of those institutions [...]

Before the recent Canadian federal election, Stephen Harper visited Longueil, not far from Montreal, OTL and others were there to meet him, including Melanie Kal, who files this report I, Melanie, performed in a jam for the first time in my life wearing an Official Man’s outfit.  needless to say – this included his face [...]

With this year’s Buy Nothing Day only four days away, here’s a look back at The Chartwells Tour, a theatrical jam performed by OTL and Uberculture Concordia last BND to challenge the monopolizing University food service provider controlled by Compass Group Canada. Chartwells not only runs all the cafeterias at Concordia and McGill Universities, as [...]

by Cassandra Witteman I have been getting involved in theatrical experiments commenting on global culture and consumerism. This recent Buy Nothing Day, Optative Theatre Laboratories planned a performance at the flag-ship American Apparel store on St. Laurent. Unfortunately, American Apparel didn’t think very much of our statement and tried to shut us down before we [...]

by Stan Kristansen Linux is a free computer operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License, the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. By using Linux you can say goodbye to hefty software costs, hidden pop-ups, and corporate [...]