images and video via Jason Eppink
I’m a big fan of interesting public art, demonstrations or advertising because it interupts the day to day and causes a person to pause. Anything that can grab someone’s attention even for a moment in the hustle and bustle of daily life is a good thing. So often we bury ourselves in our routines that we find ourselves wondering halfway through the day….where did the day go? what did I do with the last hour? Is it really May…what happened to April?
But not only is it a problem that we don’t pay attention to the world around us but often we are so over stimulated by things like advertising covering all of our vertical surfaces that we tend not to pay attention to the things around us because we are almost trained to ignore it. It’s everywhere and it has become a visual nuissance.
I love this artistic statement called Pixelator in New York City that turns obnoxious advertising screens into dynamic works of art. And the best part is, it’s ridiculously simple. Sheer brilliance I say. From the website: Pixelator is an unauthorized on-going video art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists.
Since 2003, the MTA has made available for exhibition purposes 80 LED screens located at subway entrances across New York City. Unfortunately, the high cost of exhibiting (an estimated $274,000 per month per screen) prevents most artists from having access to these facilities. While the MTA’s effort to create more opportunities for video art exhibition in public spaces is to be commended, selected works remain wholly fixated on commercial goods and media conglomerate events, a short-sighted curatorial choice that regrettably ignores the full potential of these promising exhibition spaces.
In an attempt to broaden the scope of MTA’s video art series, Pixelator takes video pieces currently on display and diffuses them into a pleasant array of 45 blinking, color-changing squares. Since the project is an anonymous collaboration, the resulting video is almost entirely unplanned and unanticipated, with the original artists helping to create new works of art without any knowledge of their participation.
(Translation: Pixelator turns those ugly, blinding video billboard ads into art.)
And on a total random note, when I typed the credit links to the photos for Jason Eppink on here I had a total déjà vu feeling and then I realized this person who created the Pixelator also took the photos for the keyboard monument I posted about just yesterday. I totally didn’t even realize the two were the same person until just this moment. Crazy.
I also like this project that was done through a collaboration between Anti-Advertising Agency and Grafitti Research Lab that tries to expose the large numbers of mind-numbing ads plaguing the streets of NYC. They set out to cover up New York City’s video advertising screens with messages like “NYC’s True Graffiti Problem”. Check out the video:
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