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Hacking the Highways
cindy writes "LA artist Richard Ankrom got fed up with the terrible signage on the Harbor Freeway. Rather than wait for CalTrans to do something about it, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He carefully made additional signage and added it to an existing freeway sign. The results were so good that no one, including CalTrans, noticed for months! The LA Times has an article including some of the video shot by the artist to document his "crime.""
, Ankrom decided to take matters into his own hands by adding a simple "North 5" to an existing sign.
The guy added "North 5" to the sign for god sake! How is this art?
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Oh jesus... now instead of "make a beowulf cluster of those" its "make a case mode out of that."
LOSER!
I do hope there will be no copycats for this thing. Some people with less pure intentions (e.g terrorists) might decide to do some redirecting.
It might be useful if he does get some sort of punishment (slap on the wrist maybe). The powers-that-be must show they have working teeth.
P.S. I have also heard of artist painting stamps on their envelopes just to show they can do it (it cost way more than the stamp price in both time and money).
P.P.P Does this qualify as an art-hack?
The measurement used was the "Smoot" after fraternity pledge Oliver Smoot - here's the offical story of how the "Smoot" measurement came to be.
He made a compelling statement. Something really obvious needed fixing and the responsible authorities were too clueless to fix it, so he fixed it for them.
If everyone had a constructive attitude like that, think what a society we'd have. People would automatically pick up trash, report suspicious behavior, finger dishonest colleagues or employers, and generally apply millions of little improvements to the status quo. Too bad most people are too selfish/alienated/cynical to care. It's inspiring to see someone who does care, and passionately, too.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
"It needed to be done," he said from his downtown loft. "It's not like it was something that was intentionally wrong."
While I think what this guy did was very neat, his statement above is exactly the reason WHY there are laws against things like this.
As much as the average 'Joe' would like to think they can make decisions for the rest of the world, sometimes there are some things that experts know more about. And yes, sometimes bureacracy gets in the way - but just imagine if we allowed your average person on the street to dictate how a tcp/ip stack should be implemented, or what have you.
"Not intentionally wrong" is all fine and dandy, but there are still thousands of laws on the books (some rightfully so) that will still get you (negligence laws come to mind). You don't have to MEAN to do harm for harm to be done.
Regardless, pretty cool stunt, and it's good that this sort of thing likely won't be repeated a million times over - I can't count the number of times I've heard "why do they put a stop sign here? there's really no need to stop at all!".
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I hope you were trying to be sarcastic. That certainly doesn't describe the kind of world I aspire to live in.
As we have to deal with more and more complexity, one thing that can help is truth in labeling/signage/documentation so we can have justified confidence in things we encounter occasionally without needing to become experts in their every detail.
I for one do not want to trust "powers-that-be" to get their labeling/signage/documentation right every time to the finest detail
However it does seem to me to be a good idea for the content of signs et al to be open to public review, a concept that the Internet and an open ended program to devolve responsibilities for detail to a more local level can both help with.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
You'd think that the people in charge of the signs would notice that there was an addition that hadn't been authorized. Instead, Caltrans is apparently a big enough beaurocracy that nobody noticed the change, or if they did they assumed that somebody else had authorized it.
How many signs do you think there are on the freeways in the Los Angeles area? Even assuming that there is only a single person in Caltrans that all sign requests go to, what are the chances that he drives that particular route frequently enough to notice a difference? And if he does drive the route that frequently, he probably wouldn't even notice, since I'm sure most people have their route memorized and don't even look at the signs anymore. And if he's just randomly tooling around LA when he sees the sign, unless he's Rain Man, there's little chance that he has EVERY sign memorized and therefore wouldn't notice. The people that might notice are the blue-collar guys that are out driving the highways every day, and they are very justified in assuming that someone else made the change. I agree with the original poster, I don't see how this is art. Funny and useful, yes. But art? I don't see it.
Chris Beckenbach