Tunnel Vision: Metro Zoetrope
"I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad's successor, a campaign for a movie 'coming to theatres' last February, was only removed recently - with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it's relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek's ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris' Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States - and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico."
(Christopher Szabla, Urbanphoto, 20 November 2010)
Fig.1 Bill Brand, "Masstransiscipe" New York subway installation.
Fig.2 New ad-places in the tunnel. // Новые рекламные площади в тунеле киевского метро. Между станциями Лукьяновская и Львовская Брама
Fig.3 "Something Cool in L.A. Subways", Uploaded by TransformedMan on 23 May 2008.
Fig.4 "Tokyo Subway Ad ", Uploaded by ivanptse on 19 Apr 2008.
Fig.5 "Target ad, on the washington D.C subway.", Uploaded by kikyobackfromthedead on 1 Sep 2006.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
One Hit Wonders: singers and groups who made a single hit song and were never heard from again
"The history of popular music is haunted by the ghosts of scores of singers and groups who made a single hit song and were never heard from again. Periodically radio stations that specialize in classic rock will devote a weekend to these one-hit wonders"
(David W. Galenson)
Galenson, David W., One Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most Important Works of Modern Art are Not by Important Artists (November 2004). NBER Working Paper Series, Vol. w10885, pp. -, 2004. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=618522
Fig.1 C. W. McCall (1975). "Convoy"; Fig.2 Promises (1978). "Baby it's You"; Fig.3 The Swingers (1982). "Counting The Beat"; Fig.4 Deee-Lite (1990). "Groove Is In The Heart"; Fig.5 OMC (1995). "How Bizarre"
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Art Project: take a virtual (Google) tour of famous art museums
"Simply select a museum from the homepage and then either choose 'Explore the museum' or 'View Artwork'. Once you are in the main site use the drop-down menus or the side info bar to navigate between artworks and museums. Finally create and share your own collections online."
(Google, 2011)
Fig.1 Art Project - Visitor Guide, Google.
Fig.2 Art Project - Behind the Scenes, Google.
Fig.3 Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky, Vasily Perov
Fig.4 navigate the Uffizi Gallery via the Google Art Project
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Chronological ordering highlighting the human cost of The Vietnam War
"Maya [Lin] unexpectedly won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while a Yale student, and it threw her into a huge storm of controversy. The controversy over Maya Lin's design showed the raw emotional wounds that still had not healed when it erupted in 1980, and Maya Lin's finished memorial showed the power of art to affect people and touch upon important issues of society.
...
Lin wanted her memorial to evoke tears in the viewers, to act as a vehicle for veterans to begin to heal from their experience. One of the most touching scenes in Freida Lee Mock's documentary is the beginning scene, watching the reaction of veterans as they look at the names of their fallen comrades in the black wall. In a particular scene, two veterans are looking at the name and one veteran exclaims, 'Look at all these names!' and he begins to cry. What most moved about these scenes was how the memorial touched these veterans, how it honoured the individuals who were killed by making them more than just a statistic. A veteran mentioned that a name may not mean much to one person, but it would mean much to another. Lin put the names in chronological, rather than alphabetical order, to help individualize the names. If the names were in alphabetical order, then a loved one would be lost in a sea of Smiths or Jones or whatever that person's last name is, and it would depersonalize that individual. It would take a person longer to look up the name and find it if the names were in chronological order, but the process would be worth it to a family member or a friend."
(Angelo Lopez, 26 May 2008)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Holocaust Museum
"Welcome to the Holocaust Theme Park A sort of Disneyland hyper-real tour of the past is offered at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC - a 'theme park' stroll through genocide. On admission you are issued with an ID card, matching your age and gender to the name and photo of a real holocaust victim or survivor. As you progress through 3 floors of the exhibition, you can push your bar-coded card into computer stations and see how well or how badly your real life subject is faring. Will you (like him or her) end up saved, shot, gassed, incinerated? You'll find extermination camp bunks on which inmates lay unspeakably crammed, dying of malnutrition and typhus. You'll see the ovens in which victims of Zyklon-B gassings were burnt. Worst of all is the endlessly re-run video footage of EINSATZGRUPPEN mass-killing squads at work, shooting, stabbing, and filling ditches with piles of naked corpses. You are watching historical snuff movies. Have you really experienced the Holocaust in this Postmodern theme park? At the end, you'll find visitor's ID card dumped in litter bins among the drink bottle and chocolate wrappers. Your hyper-reality tour is over."
(Richard Appignanesi, 1995)
Appignanesi, R. 1995 Introducing Postmodernism, New York, US: Totem Books. 1419711
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
