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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.""
Just saw this stury on the News tonight. Pretty funny story. The guy is glad no charges are being pressed( for trespassing and impersonation, he dressed up as a construction worker ). Of course this is hollywood, so he made a documentary about his crusade to do CalTrans job for them. He encourages others to go fix things that are wrong, sounds like someone who would fit in OS.
Spencer Ogden
This story reminds me of a somewhat similar occurrence that is currently going on at MIT. When I was taking a tour at the campus we walked past a rather large bridge. The tour guide informed us that a local fraternity used the bridge for hazing purposes, and labeled distances on the street in some unit (it started with a Q, quibs maybe?).
To this day police officers record the spot of accidents in the same unit ("Ahh, yeah, we've got a fender bender at 24 quibs").
Can anyone more familiar with the area fill in my holes?
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?
Well you certainly dont consider West 3 art, do you??
They could have grafitti'd "Peace, Love, Linux, this way to Oakland" on the sidewalks in San Francisco. Then they might have gotten some GOOD press...
Congratulations for reading the article.
He made a perfect replica of a highway sign, which probably isn't all that easy to do on your own. He did it in broad daylight. He got away with it for months. Besides, art imitates life (or in this case, makes life a little easier for everyone else.)
Considering that the signs were good enough that no one noticed for nine months... If they weren't they are certainly well crafted.
Spencer Ogden
http://web.mit.edu/museum/fun/smoots.html
I was one of the motorists who drove by it about, oh, a thousand times. I even used it to go to a wedding a few miles north on the I-5. I just thought when I saw it the first time, "Hey CalTrans is finally doing its job."
He added something to a highway sign. Something that appears on thousands of highways signs in the country. What point is he trying to make here? The article made numerous references to an almost heroic face-egging of the elite pork-barrelists in their ivory towers, but why? Kind of funny how the transit authority agreed with him...kind of cheapens the whole thing. Maybe they understand it.
Does the fact that he was very careful in making this sign make it art? Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art? The faceless school gestapo will never notice, and my sign may be seen by dozens of unwary students shuffling to and from class in that way they tend to. I'll be a hero. Take THAT, facilities and maintanance!
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
What I want to see him do next is come re-stripe North Carolina's highways. For those who don't know it, NC has this rather odd policy of redirecting the right lane off onto *almost* every exit and adding a new lane somewhere else to compensate. It's really stupid, for a few reasons. First off is that if you were cruising along in the slow lane and didn't want to exit, guess what...you get to go anyway, unless you want to be a traffic hazzard. Second, is the inconsistency. If every lane went off, maybe you'd get used to it, screwy as it is. Last, about every place I've ever been hashes off the exit lane, so it's obvious that it's going away.
Then again, I'm sure something is really wacked at NCDOT. Else how do you explain the fact that the 440 beltway around Raleigh intersects with itself . Someone at NCDOT has a good supplier of (1) moonshine or (2) crack.
What is your Slash Rating?
Troy, Michigan:
I75 - Exit 69 - Big Beaver Road.
Everytime I take that exit I think that SOMEONE in the DOT was pulling a similar stunt.
It's a hell of a good joke, some fine craftsmanship, and a poke at authority. Perhaps that's enough to call it art.
Kinda like the guy that 'draws' $20 bills and trades them to people in exchange for goods & services, or the urban ledgend about the illustration artist who send a postcard resume to a prospective employer that simply stated, "Examine the stamp" (which was, of course, hand drawn). It's not high art in the classic sense, but it requires more skill than Madonna's last twelve albums and a hell of a lot more creativity.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
What else do you expect from the state that brought us Interstate 238?
If you drive on 4th Street from east of Freeway 5, driving westwards toward the freeway interchange, you first see (two arrows, one points up, the other points right):
^
|| Santa Ana
I-5
Los Angeles =>
where "Los Angeles" points to the entrance of North I-5 on the right hand side. And then after you pass that entrance continuing on 4th Street, crossing under the freeway bridge, you see the sign for the second entrance to South I-5 on the left hand side (the arrow points left):
= Los Angeles
\
SOUTH I-5
So there are two signs, pointing in opposite directions and contradicting each other, all showing the way to Los Angeles! But neither is right, because the way to Los Angeles is to go straight on 4th Street. From there you don't need to enter the freeway to go to Los Angeles downtown.) The error has been there for at least three years and no one is fixing it. No doubt people take matter into their own hands.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Here's an interesting picture of "Hacking the Highways".
The highlights aren't vandalism of the spray paint and broken windows variety, but vandalism of a more artistic or pointed sort that often leaves the target looking better than before.
The really destructive vandalism, alas, is usually bought and paid-for, and protected by the powers-that-be. One way to reclaim private advertising in public places is to Convert Billboards to Chalkboards. This is one you can do in your spare time - hop to it!
The folks at Baby Smasher Industries will sell you some amended "instructions for use" stickers that show how restroom baby-changing stations are really meant to be population control devices.
The folks at Fortean Times have kept their fingers on the pulse of curious vandalism: Authorities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were called to the scene to investigate when fifteen trees in a city park were fitted with doorknobs and locks. Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.
In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the “Stalingrad” metro station in Paris to read, instead, “Gdansk” (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).
What would you do, given the inclination?
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Erm, the aforementioned form is broken, says the latest irix version is 5.0 when I have 8 installed.
http://forms.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
We call that "Drunks on Main Street". Best viewing around 11pm and 2am.
Ever since the double hammer blow of postmodernism and deconstructionism, art has been mostly defined as "whatever people who think they are artists call art". Being an Artist is now mainly an ego-boost, and is used to raise themselves in quality above the riff-raff, like us.
If I did it, it would not be art, because I'm not a artiste.
I pity the modern artist; adrift in a sub-culture that actively works to undermine everything, even itself; they live in a solipsistic nightmare.
Is a soup can art? At least this has the performance aspect.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
"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.
I'd love to dump hot grits down my pants in front of this sign.
I think it's rather a fun idea, actually. I can think of a few places in Massachusetts where this would be a good idea (the ancient I-95 shields on the Tobin Bridge in Charlestown, for example, when I-95 hasn't gone anywhere near the Tobin Bridge, or even Boston for that matter, for about twenty years now).
Artists do a lot of strange things that make one slap one's head and say "dammit, why didn't I think of that?" Reminds me very much of the artist I once saw on TV who used to print his own dollar bill designs. He didn't spend the bills exactly, just traded them for goods with willing merchants. (I don't think it qualified as counterfeiting, as he was treating it as a barter transaction and most of them didn't look much like the real thing anyway.)
Every once in a while the phrase "subvert the dominant paradigm" doesn't sound like the fourth tattered bumper sticker from the right on the back of some aged hippie's car...
/Brian
Here's a page about a guy who has done several of these, although he doesn't them more from a prankster point-of-view. They aren't vandalism as you might think, but just fun stuff that he makes to see how long his art goes by unnoticed.
Most of them are funny, like the one where he finds a sign at a cafe explaining "How to put the lid on your coffee," (duh!) and changes it to a version which contains many sexual overtones that even fools the employees.
The idea that "art is what I say it is" is reasonably valid; the only thing is that it may be art, but it can very easily be BAD art. I look at it this way: art has to reach its audience. If it doesn't, it's bad art, though still art. For the record, I do think dadaism is mostly pretentious silliness for people not quite smart enough to out-Magritte Magritte. I will say, however, that every once in a while a statement of that sort impresses me. Hacking a road sign is certainly in that category; if anything it is more akin to MIT hacks, which I would consider art in a sense as well.
There's good art, which reaches its audience, often (but not always) tells a story, and works on levels as simple as "look what I can do with a couple of lines and blocks of color" (Mondrian) and "pretty Italian girl with strange expression" (the Mona Lisa) to something as complex and/or controversial as "Sex is fun, get comfy with it" (Annie Sprinkle) and "Remember those caught in the middle" (Guernica by Picasso) to something unusual along the lines of "enjoy your food" (Thomas Keller's restaurant, the French Laundry) or "remember the nameless" (the New England Holocaust Memorial, with its etched rows of numbers).
Some artists do have solipsistic tendencies; endless reams of teen angst poetry are only the beginning of that. IMHO deconstructionism has been a disaster for the humanities, occasionally a useful tool but generally bypassing intent and message to focus solely on motivation. Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message". While I don't think this was precisely what he was talking about, art is still a form of mass communications. If the artist can't communicate with the audience, that doesn't make it not art. If the artist chooses to use a nontraditional medium to make his point, that doesn't make it not art. The idea of modern art is to push the frontiers. Honestly, to me a Mondrian is indistinguishable from the pattern of a set of drapes that might have been sitting around since 1970. That's fine. But the fact is that you can't dismiss the idea that "art is what I say it is" out of hand.
This guy chose to use a BGS (Big Green Sign) as his medium. I would personally consider calling it art to be a stretch, but it's an incredible hack, and if you consider hacks to be artistry it is an excellent example of it.
/Brian
This is nothing new, Culture Jammers have been changing the meaning of signs and images for a while now, a great source for this is adbusters.org
/. readers is the defacement of a microsoft XP billboard in england
l lery/street/ is the main culture jammers gallery.
As for the method explained in the article, this was about helping people by altering existing signage.
Culture jamming is usually about subverting whatever message is present into something else.
One example that may interest
http://mirrors.meepzorp.com/xpsucks/
quite amusing, and very cost effective! Let the corporations pay for the message, and use it against them!
http://www.adbusters.org/creativeresistance/jamga
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
No, engineering (supposedly) makes life easier for everyone. Art says something transcendant about the human condition. I don't think "Interchange coming up" quite rises to this level.
Just because it's difficult and takes care, doesn't mean it's "art". Just because it was subtle doesn't mean it's "art". Just because he ret-conned it as sticking it to the faceless bureaucracy, doesn't mean it's "art".
It might qualify as a hack, which is orthogonal to its being art, but I have my doubts even there. This guy had his sign seem invisible because it made sense. A good hack plays with what's there, in a way not consistent with the original scene, so that later, you ask, "Why the heck didn't I see that?"
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
another artist pulls a stunt to draw attention to himself.
Unfortunately for him he didnt really find a way to show off his art. Making a sign to exact caltrans specs isnt really art.
If the artist chooses to use a nontraditional medium to make his point, that doesn't make it art, either. Too much of modern art -- to my admittedly untrained eye -- is the form of "Look at how clever I am to do something to this medium." That's not enough to qualify.
Modern art seems to be a collection of people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" I disagree that this is really art. Art is a transcendant statement about the human condition. This is a road sign. I don't think they overlap.
I don't think this is an incredible hack. Its invisibility depended only on its utter reasonableness. He crafted a good sign but essentially he was just an unpaid independent contractor for CalTrans. True hacks, the really good ones, fade into the background by taking advantage of your preconceptions, but then get you to scratch your head and wonder, how did I ever think that was normal. A true hack, in the same vein as this alleged one, was when MIT students replaced the engraving(!) in one of their halls. They changed the motto of the school to something more, well, offbeat, and did it by carving the letters into foam, then placing them in front of the actual letters. Thus, people saw engraved letters and just filed it away, not noticing till much later that the mottom was wrong.
That was a great hack. This, this is just roadwork.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Now, for extra bonus points, is this little exchange (or at least my initial post) art, in that I overstated my opinion, hoping to get a post exactly like yours?
I'm not quite as cynical as my initial post made me out to be; but if I had to pick one of the extreme positions to take, I'd be unusually comfortable with the extreme position that modern (which is to say, the last five years, rather then a technical term referring to a specific period and style) art is largely irrelevant, due to excessive insularity and defensiveness.
Personally, I think 'hack' comes a lot closer; even in the normal artsy-fartsy sense. I don't see what borders this pushed exactly (except legal ones!), which you can see many posters on the subject alluding to. Still, regardless of what you call it, I think it was worth doing. I get the sense this is "art-for-want-of-a-better-term", because his community doesn't know the word "hack".
I've been thinking about putting up "Keep Right Except to Pass" signs along the left side of the interstates where I live. (Along with those "Fine for Littering" signs). I went so far as to get the specs off the web, but when I found out how much it was going to cost for angle-iron/other hardware and the signs themselves I decided I'd wait until I could afford enough to be meaningful.
Just because someone did something to make a point, or for art doesn't excuse them from the law. Should he get more then a wrist slap? probablt not. But what if I go do it, not as good, but I call it art? does that mean I can tresspass? I highly doubt it. Not to mention the risk to other motorist if he should fall. Risk to him is his to make.
Lets not forget he did not even attempt an effort to contact caltrans. I mean if it turned into a costly affair or they wouldn't listen and he was protesting the bureaucrasy(mangled that word) that would have a point. I've dealt with caltrans, and it wasn't all that hard to at least get my request heard.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
did anyone else read the topic, go to the article, expecting to see what clever, funny, insightful thing he had done, that escaped everyone for so long?
and when i found out, they treat it like its amazing this went undiscovered, as if cal trans is checking at all to make sure that every sign is exactly the ame every day.
wow, its like he snuck a car into a parking lot, and then im supposed to be amazed noone thought this was out of the ordinary.
now, if he had worked "laker fans ->" into the staples center sign, and noone caught it for a while, that would have been great. or maybe a political comment near the city hall offramp, a snide remark at hollywood in a applicable spot...but what he did is pretty unremarkable.
and seriously, maybe im not remembering the article correctly, but this took him 2 years to execute??
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
How about the theme of some Joe Shmoe damning the man and just doing it his own way. That seems to be a fairly recurring theme on /.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
In the world of aviation, even the FAA has some humor. For instance on the GPS 16 approach into Portsmouth NH, the Instrument Approach Fixes (IAF's, points defined in airspace for an instrument flight path to a runway) are named ITAWT ITAWA PUDYE TATT and the missed approach is named IDEED.
On the ILS 18 approach into Lebanon NH, the fixes are named HAMMM, BURGER and FRYYS
No offense, but have you checked to see if there are any of these dot pattern changes or signs along your freeways?
No offense, but who cares if there are any dot pattern changes or signs along the freeway to indicate this? It's horrible and unsafe road design, for the simple reason that it is not what people expect. On my drive to work on the interstate through Rochester, NY, I would actually have to start in the leftmost of three lanes if I wanted to stay in the same lane for the entire trip, because the two lanes to my right were "exit only" at some point, and were replaced on the left. So I would start in the left-most of 3 and end up in the right-most of 3, without ever changing lanes. This is really stupid. Most people expect to get in a lane and be able to drive in that lane, not have to play musical lanes just to stay on the highway.
Well, while I was a fish in the dorms I changed a sign from "All Visitors Must Be Escorted" to "All Escorts Must Be Visited"... went unnoticed by most everyone all year long... gave me a chuckle every time I entered... guess I'm an artist too...
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Similarly, ramps around the country have signs that indicate direction of travel by using place names. So instead of "I-405 North / I-405 South" over the left and right lanes respectively, you get something like "I-405 Everett / I-405 Renton". Unless you live in the area, how the heck are you supposed to know which of these obscure places is north or south of your current position?
I firmly believe that highway signs should be usability tested in PC-based driving simulators or something similar before they can be foisted on the public. Seriously: A little bit of effort to make these things easier to understand could help reduce the traffic snarls that develop when people get confused and slow down or, worse, have to slam on their brakes or cut across traffic at the last minute because the signs weren't clear.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
So how long before a copycat who isn't so benevolent causes mayhem by modifying a sign that deliberately messes things up?
Hey.... your sig is the same as mine!
From: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~opa/ur/pranks.html
In 1988, a group of students pulled off the biggest prank at Rice. They rotated the 2,000 pound statue of William Marsh Rice 180 degrees, making Willy face Fondren Library for the first time in 58 years.
"We were sitting in the pub drinking beer, and we decided something had to be done," says John Q. Smith '86, who helped mastermind the operation. After two futile attempts, the pranksters decided the third time had to be the charm.
Three electrical engineers, two mechanical engineers, a civil engineer, a mathematical scientist, a biochemist, a chemist, a physicist and an English major put their brains and brawn together to carry out the elaborate scheme.
Using plans of the statue taken from Fondren Li-brary, they simulated the transfer load through a computer model. They built two 24- foot A-frames, which they painted black to blend with the night, and put a beam on top that supported a three ton hoist in the middle and two one ton hoists on the sides.
The A-frames were tested at an off-campus garage by lifting a 2,250-pound Toyota that was swung back and forth to simulate rotation. A pair of Houston police officers looked on after being told the car hoisting was "a senior research project. "
These same police officers stopped the students as they were hauling the A-frames back to campus. Convinced it was only a school project, the officers gave the students a police escort to Entrance 8.
Lookouts and decoys positioned themselves around the Quad and communicated to each other through walkie-talkies using code names from the X-Men comic book series. The light on Anderson Hall had been turned off every night for the two previous weeks. Each morning the pranksters reconnected the light so that physical plant people would not replace it.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, Apri112, 1988, before the sun came up, Willy sat facing the library. Only one student was caught, Patrick Dyson '88, and was made to pay the cost of turning the statue to its rightful position.
Students rallied behind Dyson and sold T -shirts that read, "Where There's A Willy, There's a Way. " More than enough money was collected to pay the cost of restoring Willy to his familiar perspective.
What took the pranksters one hour and cost $400 to do took professional movers three hours and a rumored $1,500-$2,000 to remedy. The students were blamed for breaking a guide pin underneath the statue, but they claim the professional movers did that.
Reports of the prank quickly spread across the country with the help of the media.
"People are going to have a hard time beating this one," comments a contented Smith.
Well, maybe. But Rice students don't have excellent minds for nothing and they know quite well that a masterminded prank is a terrible thing to waste.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I typed up a description of what happened in the video for the benefit of visually impaired slashdotters. Here it goes:
For the first seventeen seconds, the disembodied head of Richard Ankrom floats mysteriously in front of his road sign as it talks about his project in a spooky, ominous voice.
In the next scene (you can hear the music change), you see him carefully examining a post with the INTERSTATE 5 symbol. The camera changes to a close up so you can see him comparing the blue of the shield a a color wheel he holds againts the sign.
Another scene change. Now Rick is on a bridge, looking down along the road sign attached to its side. He takes out his ruler... suddenly a big ruler fades, phantom-like, into the middle of the screen! The background fades into Rick's pepective, looking down at the road below as the cars drive underneath him--yet the ruler... remains! It moves further away, then closer, and starts to slide to the right as the background switches to the original view of the scene. Rick disappears as he bends behind the sign...
...and now a white-gloved hand rubbing a cloth over the pencil-outlined letters "RS"... the camera zooms out... "ERS"... "TERST"... now the camera is so far away that you can no longer recognize the letters. All you see in that same mysterious hand--now attached to an arm--rubbing what looks like dirt on a white surface. Wait... now you can see an outline! Its an interstate shield!
As the significance of this realization grips us, the rubbing hand fades away to a shadow... and then two shadows... and then none.
The camera has now pulled back to the point where we can catch a glimmer of Rick's chest--apparantly he is standing by his drawing. He walks to the side, and starts to roll it up--revealing a white shield lying underneath it!
The camera zooms... we are just able to make out the word "interstate" as the image changes.
We can now see the letters "ERST", only now in thicker pencil. Some sort of pale coloring lies ever the E... wait! That coloring is actually a sheet, which Rick is now using to cover "RST". You can only see his hand as it sets it down. His thumb rubs the top of the sheet, and then his fingers do the rest. The world becomes fuzzy...
We see the letters "RST"--the "E" presumably being covered by his hand. A ruler lies underneath the letters, oriented such that the numbers read upside-down to us. He traces along the ruler with a sharp object as hand and ruler and object all fade into oblivion, leaving only the letters. His hand mysteriously fades in and out at different positions and angles, cutting away at the outlines of different letters. A piece of his forehead pops into the scene, and then...
We see him peeling off the pale covering--yet pieces of it now remain where the letter outlines had been traced.
Now the angle shifts. We are now looking down at the word "INTERSTATE" from the right. He is applying some sort of pale tan tape to the top of the words. These hands start to fade away as another pair of hands fades in, applying tape to the left side. (The arms remain hidden.)
The image now dissolves into a completely new scene. We look down at both of his arms and hands donned in white gloves as one hang scoups green paint out of a can being held by the second. A color table lies sprawling open on the wooden table beneath.
The camera zooms out a little as his right hand stirrs the paint.
The hands fade away... now we see him (even a portion oh his head!) carefully comparing a rectangle he his holding in his hand to the aforemetioned color table.
Dissolution steals this image and replaces it with another. We are now outdoors. We can see Rick frow the abdomin up, facing us, and spraying red paint over our eyes. As the image is covered with this foggy red, the image transitions to a more solid red, with the clear white words "Pantone Color 199-200" at the bottom.
The red disappears as quickly (yet as gradually) as it appeared. We now see Rick spraying red the top of the interstate shield as it lies up-side down against some sort of rectangular prop covered in cloth.
The spray-paint disappears and the red paint on the sign becomes... green? Ah, no, it is now being covered with a green sheet as Rick sprays the top of the sign blue.
The red words "Pantone Color 293" fade onto the bottom, ominously, and then vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.
A fast fade... now we see him spraying green onto some sort of table lying not far off the tiled ground... and green slowly blends into the scene along with the white words "Pantone Color 340-341" until both dominate... but once they do, the letters fade and a hand moves into our vision.
The hand peels away... an R! Realization dawns upon us as the angle changes to show him peeling off the letter to its right.
The scene changes again. Now we shee the shield standing upright, in its glorious red, white, and blue, as his hands, reaching from the top of our vision, cut away an "E" and completing the white word "INTERSTATE" at the top of the sign. He then peels off the last of the border lying at the top on the sign.
His body now fades into the right of the screen, starting to peel... something from the middle of the sign. The camera zooms into his hands... both hands are now peeling away at...
The bottom of a 5 appears in our vision, filled with several strange circles. His hand reaches from the bottom of our vision, grabs, and removes one of the circles.
Our vision grows blurry... now we see the bottom of a drill, as the hand repeatedly squezes the handle.
Quick fade.. we see some sort of nozzle being pressed against a small disc held by three of his fingers. We zoom in and watch as the nozzle squirts glue which Rick traces into a circle. This being done, the nozzle is pulled away...the scene changes...
...and we watch as the same hand now PUTS BACK the circle it had earlier removed from the 5!
Dramatic music and scene change. We now see Rick from a birds-eye view as he walks along a sidewalk next to a highway... he gets smaller as the camara soars higher. He approaches a hanging overhead road sign.
Our vision quickly flicks to a new scene, where we now see him much closer, almost completely obscured by greenery as he lays a ladder againts a large, metal pole.
The scene again changes abruptly, now showing us pole and ladder from a side view. We zoom into the ladder...
And switch back whence we came. Now Rick is climbing up his ladder....
Ane now we are like an eyeball floating in space, peering at Rick from a moderate distance as he makes it to the top of the ladder. We see him toss some white object (his towel?) onto a porch under the sign.
For a single instant, our vision changos, showing him leaning down and doing something next to the left side of the sign. Less than a second later we now see him climbing a stepladdep as he carries the word "NORTH" in white on a green background. It looks as if a piece of the sign was missing (or is it just a board lying against the sign?)...
...before we can ponder this thought for too long, the angle switches again. Now we see him from above and to the side as he mounts the right side of "NORTH" to the road sign. (It was a board, by-the-way.)
The scene has changed again. Now we see him kneeling on the "porch" under the sign on the right side... it looks as if he is prying or pulling a blue shield with a 5 on it out of a black bag.
The camera again flicks back, now showing Rick as he carries his shield over to the left side. We hear voices.
Now we are closer to him and see him lifting the shield against the sign... now we are above him and watch as he uses his electric screwdriver to mount it into place.
We watch from behind as he now removes the wooden board, first on the ladder, then on the porch (a tricky task, seeing as NORTH and 5 were both mounted over it for some reason). The 5 droops to the side... the scene changes and now we watch him fixing it.
The image becomes blurry and turbulent. Red words appear in two lines along the bottom of the screen: "Camera 3: Mark Concha" and "Driver/Grip: Markus Hays"
We see, vaguely (since our vision is shaking around) a man on a platform on a metal pole... another man breifly enters our vision.
Our vision stops jolting as terribly, but is now a touch unfocused. It is now directed directly at the road sign, and zooms in to the man as he walks across the porch.
Everything becomes much clearer and the words at the bottom disappear. We watch a little above and from a moderate distance (just far enough away to see the entire hanging road sign) as Rick takes down his ladder and carries it back to the right side of the sign. As he is about 1/2 of the way across the scene changes to show him climbing back down the ladder and to the ground.
Fade to black.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Tracey Emin beat you both to it
see what Rolf says
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
but there are no dots and precious few signs. And as the poster from New York pointed out, dots and signs or no, it's still a really stupid idea to do thinks like that.
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Where on earth do you think the IRA get most of their funding?
Where do you think Al Qaeda got their funding before the Russians left Afghanistan?
Where do the guerillas in Nicaragua get their funding?
And so on...
Deleted
Check this map to see our really wacked beltline. Notice the small "triangle" of freeway at the left side of the city between Raleigh and Cary. The uppor portion is the Wade Ave. Extension, which lets people going between north Raleigh and I-40 make the transition without going to the southwest corner of the beltline.
:) If you are on the southern portion of the beltline going west, you have the advantage of avoiding the clover-leaf design, but you still have a one-lane switch, or you find yourself headed north on I-40 until you reach the Wade Ave. Extension, where you head back west.
Now, if you look at the interchange marker right above the words "Piney Points" and to the left of "Caraleigh", you will see where our beltline meets itself at a 90 degree angle. At this point, if you are going southwest on the beltline you literally have to take a right hand turn onto a one-lane clover-leaf to get back onto the interstate. If you don't, you find yourself passing through Apex
I've been here almost 2 years, and it took me a good 3 months to get used to that.
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An old boss of mine (from when I used to work on Aviation Parkway) is running technology meetings every couple months over on Perimiter Park. Drop me an email and I'll let you know when the next one is set for and how to get there.
;)
It's nice being able to work downtown now since I don't have to do the Lynn Road Rat Race or the I-40 Crawl. Then again...now I do the Falls of the Neuse 500
Anyhow...time for a shower and off to work. See my site for an email address.
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And a big congrats to you as well. As noted *in the article* he freelances as a signmaker. So your comment about making a sign on your own not being that easy doesn't hold much water. For the record, I do signmaking for a living and I can tell you that making the actual sign couldn't have taken more than a couple hours, start to finish. And how is it any more of an artwork because he got away with it? How many murderers get away with their crimes for years? Does that qualify them as artists? And since it just clarified directions that should have been there in the first place, it's even easier to go unnoticed.
do not read this line twice.
Hey, that's MY sig, but I've always heard it being attributed to Voltaire. Anybody know who's quote it really is?
do not read this line twice.
There is a fine line between art and graffiti, and this man successfully walked that line.
Part performance, part painting, part film, it covers a lot.
Modern art seems to be a collection of people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" I disagree that this is really art. Art is a transcendant statement about the human condition.
Well, that's *your* definition of art, but I (and most rationalists) don't believe that any sort of "transcendant statement" about anything is possible.
The most famous picture in Western art is the Mona Lisa, which most now accept is a feminized self-portrait of da Vinci himself. All it tells us is poor Lenny da Vinci had odd hangups.
OK this is art about the same as that idiot pipe-bombing art student's "smiley face" project was art. I've attended one of the US's highest ranked art colleges and lemme tell you something, art is crap. Most of what I have seen in the art world is a waste of energy. This isn't art, it _IS_ a cool hack (which frankly I place more value on) but it's not art and shouldn't be construed as such.
IHBT?
I wouldn't say it's art. Just commentary. I'm sure there are some who might label it meta-art, but I would think that a bit pretentious.
You may be right about insularity in modern art, but that IMHO, like I said, only makes such cases bad art, or pretentious art, but not no art at all.
/Brian
Interesting point... but yeah, I suppose that follows.
/brian
Yes, but the difference is that Magritte (and Escher, and to a lesser extent Dali) plays with your head, and dadaism just whacks you over it with a snowshovel, then nails it to the wall.
/Brian
I'll just note (not that these are anywhere near as common as they were 8 months ago) that many places around here had those little movable-letters signs up saying "GOD BLESS AMERICA".
A minute or so with an anagram generator will tell you that those letters can be rearranged into "SAD MOB SACRILEGE". As I said, not that it's anywhere near as useful now as a few months ago, but the phrase could always come back in vogue.
Cary (which was recently featured in a National Geographic issue (like...July 2001 or something)) is a city on the southwest of Raleigh and the southeast of Chapel Hill (relatively speaking). It's where the high-lifestyle crowd live because they like to pay for a high rent district. (That's not a troll...just the truth). It has wierd intersecting and name-changing roads all over the place. It has at least two roads which circle the city and intersect with each other. I get horribly lost whenever I go there. In fact, the words I dread hearing when someone starts giving me directions there are It's easy to find, because I know immediately I'm going to wind up lost.
Lest you think that I joke or exaggerate, I'm told that "Cary" is also an acronym for "Containment area for relocated Yankees."
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Chris Beckenbach
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If the artist had contracted with a sign company to produce the sign and had put it up himself, it would not be art.
According to the article the "artist" makes signs for a living.
If a sign maker makes a sign and installs it himself is it art? What makes it art, the fact that he trespassed to do it, or the fact that he filmed it?
If he had done the same thing under contract with Caltran no one would call it art.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
For example, they are building the 540 outer loop around Raleigh. Also, DC and other cities have two concentric beltlines, usually (iirc), one with an odd digit and one with an even digit.
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This reminds me of another great hack in the Seattle area in Washington State. There is a geocache disguised as a library book on the shelf in a public library. The plastic protector is an exact match to the rest of the books on the shelf right down to the font on the decimal number. To see a write up on this publicly hidden cache, visit www.geocaching.com. Do a hide and seek from the menu on the left side of the page. Do a keyword search on "Overdue". The only thing this hack is missing is the pocket for the check out card on the inside. It has been there for almost a year.
The truth shall set you free!
There was a bank in Holland, MI that had a sign offering "Totally Free Checking" (in big letters) when I was in college a few years back. I knew a guy who did something similar to the guy in this article: he created false letters to match the ones on the sign exactly. He altered the sign so that it read "Totally Free Chicken". He walked into the bank a little while later, and told them with a completely straight face that he was there to get the Totally Free Chicken they were offering. The bank took down the sign, but I don't think he was ever caught.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
From http://ftp.chaven.com/pub/G-Files/Anarchy_Mechanic al/COUNTERFEITING
"One celebrated counterfeiter, Emmanuel Ninger, an immigrant Dutch sign painter known as Jim the Penman, passed bills for 14 years, from 1882 to 1896, before being caught. He created his $50 and $100 notes with pen, ink, and a camel's hair brush, and passed about 5 a month in New York City. He probably would have gotten away with it if a bartender hadn't noticed the ink on his fingers after picking a note up."
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
The authorities eventually got wise and the signs now read "LOVELOCK 70".
My dad was a division manager for a southern california construction company that did work for California Division of Highways and the federal government a lot. Anyway, he had a buddy who complaigned to him that he had a dangerous intersection near his house that really needed a stop sign. He asked my dad about the process of getting the city to put one up. My dad just ordered him an extra sign the next time he ordered signs. He had the guy pay him the $18 the stop sign cost, then helped him put it up. The guy asked "won't they notice?". Not only didn't they notice, the cops even gave some guy a ticket for running it about a week after they put it up.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I love "conspiracy theories", and the one about secret codes on signs seems pretty neat. I have heard the same thing about open stretches of highway, as well.
What I want to know about, is the "generators" on the interstates.
What do I mean by "generators"?
Some of the older interstate highways (I-17 here in Phoenix is a good example) are typically placed "below grade", that is, the surrounding roads and land are higher than the freeway, and rarely does the freeway rise to meet the grade - you travel in what is basically a concrete "chute" or "canyon".
What is interesting, and they seem to be mostly located near the off ramps, or at the end of the off ramps (but still near the freeway), are these concrete "bunkers", with large exhaust pipes sticking out of them (sometimes they aren't this blatent) - obviously a large diesel engine of some sort. I have never seen these engines run. I don't understand why they are in large concrete and steel bunkers, with walls 12-18 inches thick, thick gauge steel mesh covering openings (like that the exhaust pipes stick out from), heavy duty locks, etc - buried in the side of the concrete "chute" of the freeway or exit.
I don't know what they are for - for the size of the engine, they seem like large power generators. I suppose they could be used for water pumping as well (for the city or for flooding).
Does anyone know the purpose of these things?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
As one person once said, "the traffic roundabout is evidenced of the misplaced belief in the basic goodness of human nature."
So far the only good story I've heard WRT a roundabout was told by one of the English denizens of #slashdot. It seems he was driving his car when the gas pedal stuck...and the brakes wouldn't work. Fortunately, he had already entered a roundabout, so he just kept cruising around it until he ran out of gas.
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Agreed.
The signage in L.A. really stinks. Simple changes could save millions of hours, fuel, and frustration if added up over time.
For example, it would be nice if they painted the upcomming freeway numbers *on* the lanes a few times so that one knows whether they are in the right lane or not.
I was even thinking that a truck fitted with something like a big inkjet print head could paint such numbers without shutting down the freeway (assuming only a few lane-changers run over it before it dries. They could do it at say 3am.)
And, put the word "only" in lanes that will soon exit. One lane around here needs "NO FWY" painted on it a few times because people keep thinking it turns onto the freeway, and when they find out it is only a street left, they try to barge back in the next lane, and cause havoc.
Nobody seems to want to fix crap like that.
He is a hero in my book. I think I will go visit it next week to solute it.
Table-ized A.I.
My current hobby is donating movies to my local library with spare money. Not just any movies, but movies at the movies at the top of IMDB's fan favorite lists in each category. The Brevard County Public Libraries now have Grave of the Fireflies and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, thanks to me.
IHBT?
No, just stimulated. Trolling's quite different; this was more like "satire". My point was to encourage thought and conversation, not "just" to get a rise out of people. I'm glad you replied.
Ah, but blockquoth the LA Times article:
He didn't even try to get CalTrans to fix the problem. So this wasn't "a social statement about the failure of bureaucracy". It was a personal statement about his own failure of initiative and inability to work within a system, which he tried and condemned in his own head. It is, as too much modern "art" is, self-indulgent narcissistic claptrap.
The guy made a sign. He didn't make art.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The trick is using the cell phone with a stickshift.
--
Benjamin Coates
He even chopped off his shoulder-length blond hair to fit the role of a blue-collar freeway worker.
This is obviously one artist who does not do much construction work. If he did, he would see all lengths of hair. Caltrans may have some rules, but I doubt it.
There are some other things our artist might not know about that could cause severe injury or death. How about standard safe work practices? Did our razor wire hopping hero have a lanyard to keep his silly ass from falling into oncoming traffic? Was his scafolding proper? Did this joker use the right metals for his fasteners or will galvanic corosion kill someone one day as his sign rusts off its holder? No amount of money saved is worth life and limb, and this turkey risked his own and others to do this.
Experience here in the computer world does not translate well to the physical world of public trasportation. Stunts played on bridges can kill people. Hacking my computer is useful to me, and may be helpful to other willing users of my code, but it will never physically hurt anyone. In this case, education, training, peer review and all checks were absent. These things are fostered in the free and open software movements. The artist swung his fist, ignorant of the faces he will hit.
I'd like to see him held accountable for the cost of fixing things, just like any other contractor. At the very least, the work must be inspected and verified. He may have improved the signage, but it's doubtful his job is really up to specs and it will likely have to be torn down at the expense of more important work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.