At 11:47 p.m. on a cool evening in early March, Jordan Seiler’s operation was already behind schedule. Dressed in an army surplus cap, orange T-shirt, and faded jeans, he took a drag off a Gauloise and picked up a black-and-white vinyl poster from a mound of dozens like it on the ground. “How many of these did you make? Please tell me you made six.” The young man he was addressing – one of half a dozen buzzing around Mr. Seiler’s industrial-chic Williamsburg studio – looked up from fixing a screw gun and nodded, but Mr. Seiler had already moved on to his next concern.

Mr. Seiler, a 25-year-old Brooklyn-based artist, was preparing for the largest-ever installment of his Public Ad Campaign. As described on his Web site, his work is “a response to the deafening voice of advertising and its tendency to colonize public physical space and thus public mental space.” His method is simple: He and helpers remove advertising in public spaces and replace it with Mr. Seiler’s own art. This work is based on the belief that the community has an innate right to its public space – Mr. Seiler’s objection is more to the fact of corporate public advertising than the content of any particular campaign.

Mr. Seiler, a native New Yorker, came to the idea of using his art as protest while studying at Rhode Island School of Design, which he attended after leaving University of California at Santa Cruz a year into a biology degree. His work is part of a long tradition of artistic response to increased commercialization of public spaces. In the 1980s, Jenny Holzer started posting her “truisms” throughout the city, and last fall she took to the skies with airplane banners. Since the 1990s, the “agitpop” artist Ron English has been altering tobacco billboards to create anti-ad campaigns. And countless street artists alter or eradicate billboards and posters with a sophistication that ranges from juvenile to meticulous.

What sets Mr. Seiler apart is his objection to corporate advertising in toto; his work is a fundamental attack on commercial America. In a recent telephone interview, Barry Hoffman, an executive creative director at Young & Rubicam and author of “The Fine Art of Advertising,” contextualized this transgression as part of a tradition that’s been present “since Duchamp.” He went on to categorize Mr. Seiler’s project as an objection to “the outrage of contracting public space. He’s attacking the notion of private ownership, so the medium he’s working in – what he puts there – doesn’t matter so much … He’s assigning to art a status that is beyond the norms of the way people do business.”

The night of his largest project to date, however, Mr. Seiler was simply thinking about logistics. He had chosen to install 95 of his posters – all moody, cinematic images of women that might themselves be taken for a sophisticated and abstruse ad campaign – at 27 different locations throughout Midtown Manhattan. By 1:53 a.m., he and his helpers (all young men, mostly friends) piled into a van and headed for the city. They were to work in two teams, each scheduled to hit various locations in a coordinated strike.

With only two actual seats in the van, everyone but Mr. Seiler and the driver was crammed together on the vehicle’s deathtrap floor, slick with a dozen layers of vinyl. Mr. Seiler gave instructions from the front: “Garage posters are opened with a ratchet, phone booths are opened with your screw gun, hopefully just one single bit to get them open, subways ads the same thing but sometimes there’s a pole in which case we have the needle-nosed pliers.” Most of the night’s crew had helped Mr. Seiler before, and a sense of boyish giddiness filled the cramped carriage.

Everyone wanted to know what to do if there were any actual troubles with cops. Mr. Seiler’s main advice was to stay calm. Any interference from the police was to be immediately referred to him via walkie-talkie. If he couldn’t talk the officer into letting the poster remain, he explained, he’d do his best to assure that only he received a summons – which has happened three times before.

At 2:27 a.m., Mr. Seiler’s team made its first drop on the corner of 51st Street and 6th Avenue. He and a partner worked in smooth tandem to open the plastic facing on a phone booth, remove the ads therein, and install the three pieces Mr. Seiler had selected. They moved quickly but without furtiveness, smiling and joking as they briskly slipped “Elizabeth” in and rescrewed the plastic facing. A homeless man stood bemused nearby, watching. The booth took six minutes, then it was on to the next.

The operation grew smoother as the night progressed – by 3 a.m. the same phone booth configuration took under three minutes. At 3:16 a.m., Mr. Seiler’s team hit its first garbage can and they were immediate favorites: easy to manipulate, the four faces of a “Receptasign” can were opened and replaced by one person in less than two minutes. Over the rest of the evening, 12 of these privately owned garbage cans were appropriated.

Which was understandably frustrating to City Media Concepts, the company that owns the cans. Speaking over the phone about a week after the run, Peter Arbor, CEO of CMC, noted with satisfaction that his crews had their clients’ ads back in place within a few hours at most. Mr. Seiler had despondently reported as much on the morning following the project.

Mr. Arbor’s frustration runs deeper than a simple “theft of services,” however. He feels that artists like Mr. Seiler are working against the very aims they claim to pursue. “I understand the different opinions about advertising, but we are a public improvement organization, if anything; a partnership between private business and the city of New York,” he said. Receptasign pays a fee and gives a percentage of its revenue back to the city.

“We are a community-based program looking to beautify the city, not defile it. The artist obviously misunderstood this,” Mr. Arbor continued. It is certainly true that initiatives like Receptasign are part of the megawatt facelift that Times Square has undergone since Mr. Seiler was a child, which has brought Disney, revenue, and jobs into Midtown. Attacking advertising, many would argue, means attacking what makes New York one of the most vibrant and wealthiest cities in the world.

Speaking a few days later, Mr. Seiler sounded philosophical about much of the art being removed and pleased with the run. He is committed to remaining entirely public about the project and accepting whatever ramifications that may entail, currently working on ways to “curate” similar efforts by others also interested in “working over advertising.”

Mr. Seiler’s genuine commitment to provoking debate about how public space is used seems to be at the root of his efforts. A little after 4 a.m., at the end of a long night full of frustrating screw guns, he and a helper walked back to the van and turned a corner to spot a piece they’d put up earlier that evening, stealing Clear Channel space for a striking poster that would survive nearly a week in that heavily trafficked area. “Oh look,” Mr. Seiler said with a smile but no trace of irony, “there’s art on this block.”