Slashdot Mirror
Mystery Tiles From Around the World
puppetman writes "The Kansas City Star has an interesting story about Toynbee Tiles.
They show up embedded in streets, and can be found in the US (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Aberdeen, Edgewood, Washington, etc), Chile, Argentina and Brazil. They are made of "epoxy or super hard plastic that's actually inlaid in the asphalt itself."
The tiles invariably state, "Toynbee Ideas in Kubrick's 2001 Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter".
Sometimes there are secondary tiles that request people make more while others are of a more paranoid slant.
Toynbee was a religious historian who believed that "well-being of a civilization depends on its ability to respond successfully to challenges, human and environmental". There is even a Ray Bradbury book, The Toynbee Convector.
Toynbee.net has a link to a Usenet posting where someone ask's Kubrick's daughter if the man himself knew of the tiles.
To date, the origin of the tiles are a mystery. Any /.'ers able to provide the location of additional tiles, or perhaps clues for solving the mystery?"
So, where are all the tiles? Who knows, but it sounds like a fun thing to geocache for. :)
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
But only in the early 80's. Since the quality and durability of pavement here in Brazil is approximately the same as chicken crap, streets get paved and repaved every decade or so. They're long gone.
i have seen those here, in Philadelphia, for a long time (i guess since the 80's?) and kind of like the author i never understood them, but once the light turned green, i got on my way and totally forgot about them.
/. effect wears off you can look up your town's documented tiles.
i honestly could not tell you where they are, but after seeing the picture it came back. i don't remember what the local ones say but the style of text in the same and the size of the tiles and whatnot.
for people in Philly, i am 99% sure there is one in a crosswalk on South street maybe around 4th and south? i guess when the
I tried to push my thumbnail into the tile. It was rock hard. Harder than the asphalt itself.
How the h*** does one manage to determine if something is harder than asphalt using the THUMB?
If no more of these are appearing, maybe it is the old (now dead) guy in the article. He published an article about resurrecting dead on Jupiter, and he lived in philly where these first appeared.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I had a similar experience in Vienna/Austria. One day by accident I saw the words on an ad poster translated to latin (or some warped form of it), in pencil, all caps, about 0.7 mm high. I thought nothing of it. But having seen this one item, I suddenly saw them everywhere. I realized that in my neighborhood nearly all the names of the residents were translated (pencil, caps, ...) on the front doors. I saw timetables on bus stops translated. I started to open my eyes to it in other districts of the city. Bingo, there they were - names, ads, traffic signs, basically everything on the streets you could translate and write on had a good chance to carry them, and I kept seeing them for 12 years all over the city, until I moved away (no, not for this reason :) ;o)
There were times when I thought of charting them and trying to find out who the guy is (yes, I had nothing much to do), but I reminded myself of what can happen when one goes overboard with those things and thought better of it
A crackpot, sure, but one with a hell of a determination
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Reminds me of a paving slab in the corner of the Domplatz (cathedral square) in Koeln (Cologne - damn Slashdot's hatred of HTML entities), Germany. When I was there in the early nineties, there was the big Friedenmauer (peace-wall) - generally a post unification, end-of-history, anti-Gulf-War kind of thing - and the square was a really busy centre of demonstrators, artists and so on. Over in one corner, one of the slabs had, engraved into it, "This could be a place of historical importance". At the time, when everybody was kind of filled with a sense of capital-H history going on all around them, what with the end of the cold war, and atlases going out of date left right and centre, this seemed like a fairly profound statement - and probably encouraged the Friedenmauer builders to think that maybe they could make a difference.
Seeing this story finally inspired me to Google this phrase, and it turns out to have been the work of one Braco Dimitrijevic, and apparently other similar slabs can be found around St Martin's College in London.
Obviously no Kubrick reference, so not so geeky, but still a pretty cool bit of public-space art.
In some cities, the standard "Toynbee tile" is accompanied by smaller adjacent tiles that express sentiments such as:
Submit. Obey.
Could this be an attempt to link into the Obey phenomenon? Sure, the tiles started in the 80's, but perhaps a new breed of social engineers are trying to plug us into the idea of examining our surroundings?
Or maybe some folks think that graffetti doesn't have to be a bad spray job that says "dave love's jessica" or "metallica rules!"
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
There's a Toynbee tile in the intersection of (IIRC) Broadway and Olive streets in downtown St. Louis. I had always seen it and thought it to be a marker left over from some art festival, etc. I never had the time to stop and read it due to the rather short nature of green lights. I had no idea there were more of them until I saw a weblog entry about this site. I clicked and instantly recognized it. I have no idea how old the tile is but it's in excellent condition.
This article has a great ending.
"I ask him if he thinks maybe it's a beacon or a landing site for invading spaceships from Jupiter. `Maybe they're coming for some barbecue," I suggest.
"Could be," Edwards shrugs. "But we're closed on Sundays." "
That sums the world up so nicely. Here we have the intillectual worked into a tizzy over this mystery. We have the entire slashdot community talking about it. What does the working man have to think about it? he just doesn't want the aliens to show up sunday cause he is closed and he can't server them. In a nutshell it is saying that I have real work to do and a bussiness to run. I produce something in this world so really I don't have time to worry about silly crap on the street. I like that idea. A great way to realize that even if we had the answer it would not change on thing about our lives today.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
The "dead resurrected on Jupiter" thing made me think of Clifford Simak's City stories, in which humanity is transformed to live on Jupiter (which was some sort of paradise to the ransformed).
The "Submit. Obey." reminded me of John Carpenter's They Live.
Problem is, not much tangible progress has been made in the last 15-20 years, however. For instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars is 27.5 mpg, and that hasn't changed since 1986. The increase in the use of SUV's and pickup trucks certainly hasn't helped either. Heck, I remember my dad making a presentation to my 3rd grade class on the electric van back in 1978, but 25 years later that's not much closer to commercial viability. If you listen to the auto companies, however, they still keep saying "only a few more years..."
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This world never learns that vandalism is not art.
Whenever I have an upscale party, I toss Barry Lyndon in the DVD player, randomly skip around for a bit and hit pause. I have a beautiful, suitable-for-framing image I can display on my TV!
It's a running joke that you can pause Barry Lyndon at any random place and have an image that looks like it should be in a museaum. I've yet to disprove this.
Actually, the book was written by Clarke after talking about the movie with Kubrick. Clarke figured the only way to truly write a great screenplay was to write the novel first. The forword of Clarke's 2001 tells us so.
There are at least two in Indianapolis - One on the west side of Meridian Street at Georgia and another on the east side of Meridian Street at Maryland.
I wonder how much of this is capitalist pigs controlling the industry with their money.. maybe we have to wait for all the baby boomers to die off before we see technical innovation again
bite my glorious golden ass.
> This world never learns that vandalism is not art.
Vandalism, art, spaghetti. It's all the same -- it's an expression. Just because you don't "get it" does not mean it's not valid. It portrays the "artist's" feelings, which is what art is all about.
Here in Hamburg, we have OZ, our very own local weirdo. According to two similar newspaper articles from last year (article 1, article 2), he is in his 50s and made more than 120.000 graffiti tags around the city, nothing could stop him yet.
He was first known for spraying smileys everywhere - road signs, car wheels, everywhere he could find something round. It was cute at first, but he sprayed everywhere. He later started spraying his "oz" tag and there is virtually no public space without his tag all over Hamburg, a major German city. You can find miles and miles of small "oz oz oz oz oz" carefully sprayed on subway walls, he climbs buildings to tag the roofs...
Oz is presumed to be a mental case. He has no income, lives on welfare, the only thing he does is graffiti and even while on trials, he was caught several times when tagging. He usually tries to escape the officers who catch him by beating them up.
He has appeared to court with a sign "I am a Jew" and has now begun spraying "policemen are Nazis" or "subway watchmen are Nazis" and simple "Stop the Nazis" graffitis - again, everywhere all over town.
It's somewhat embarassing: I had US visitors in Hamburg recently and had a hard time explaining to them that all these "Stop Nazis" graffitis are in fact the work of a weirdo who declared the people trying to stop him "Nazis", not of concerned citizens afraid of a new rise of the neo-fascists.
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