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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.""
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?
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.)
http://web.mit.edu/museum/fun/smoots.html
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.
Some people with less pure intentions (e.g terrorists) might decide to do some redirecting.
actually, now that you mention it, i heard on the news today that osama's most recent fatwa was to misdirect all americans on the highway.
greg "tired of hearing everything called a terrorist" clarke
sig - .
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
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
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.
"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.
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
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
http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/02-16-98/chicago_cove r2.html m l m l
http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/StampArt0201.ht
http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago2/1102.html
http://hotwired.lycos.com/gallery/96/33/jpeg.f.ht
http://www.badpressbooks.com/mhdl.html
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.
Chris Beckenbach