Tunnel Vision

The approach of rhetorical protest through appropriating a portable LED sign is very effective. It gives an opportunity to appear and disappear from public venues. It can be operating in several places at one time and I agree it can give memorability if effectively used. Your project targeting commuters will certainly create a buzz in the community the outcome of which may only be measurable in the next election, however if one could find a way to record the dissent it could offer valuable data that can reflect public opinion for discourse. On a street one could flash headlights, beep car horn to show their solidarity. Polls can be generated and data could be transmitted directly to these LED's. I am excited to see this implemented and I hope you all are able to find sponsors to promote this so the project does not remain a hypothetical study. I have seen similar executions create quite a buzz in communities. I believe protests at grassroots level generates lasting impressions and when design communication reaches out to the targeted audience it needs to make an impact that is memorable. I think Tunnel Vision has great promise.

This is a simple, practically effective public intervention. I appreciate that it is dealing with a specific, actionable, local issue, and challenges citizens to question the authority and inherent value systems of state spending.

The LED platform is original, and seems to be a great tool to use for future interventions. Placing at construction sites works very well, and I could see many issues of corruption or misspending in infrastructure targeted by this campaign./ I would have liked to have seen video documentation (instead of the gif) of the action, as I wonder if any LED transition effects were used to animate or enhance the message. Timing also seems to be an important element that isn't very well communicated by the GIF.

I also wonder a bit about the structure of the messaging, though perhaps it is because I am not engaged in the local context and am not aware of the programs. I wonder if the amount of information is a bit much for people passing by to catch. Though I think the compare/contrast approach works really well, I wonder if it could have been simplified a bit to more quickly deliver the message.

I'd love to see more interventions using this technique.

Urban sites of gentrification, infrastructure, even basic road-works are all likely targets for this type of intervention - and that is its first and greatest strength. The appropriation of an instruction set we expect to give direction or detour information to serve critical ends is well conceived, but needs further iteration to bear greater critical weight. As a proposal for a series of interventions though, this functions very well as a disruption of expectations, conventions and acceptable communication in the urban realm.

The critical language used in this piece owes much to other installation designers and artists - Jenny Holzer, Ben Rubin, Christian Moeller, even the EGD work of Bruce Mau. Though there are obvious limits in terms of financial resources here; the use of multiple LED arrays offers the potential of multiple events simultaneously, either at one site, or distributed through a metropolitan centre. The multiplication of critical voices might add a new sequential or narrative element to a promising start. Michael Rock's Museum of the Ordinary in Manhattan could serve as a useful touch-point for the further development of this project in that sense of multiple sites at operation in sequence.

The formal control offered by the LED array lends authority, veracity and a degree of surveillance to the entire performance. If this affect is achieved through purely visual means, could not the addition of an audio component with similar formal qualities lend further effects?

Its a promising start that has identified some strong relationships between content, form, site and effect.

I should begin with a disclosure that these participants have been my students.

In spite of its practical limitations (cost, theft etc), this entry deals with the theme of Debt successfully by addressing the specific politics of the participants' personal context.

With the alleged demise of the street poster in the face of online communications, alternative forms of creative public address are critical. Personally, I think printed public media can still be valid and effective. The reach and efficiency of online address is obvious, but it's reception is generally in a private context and mediated by personal technology. The impact of the street poster was/is that it is a shared experience – that is, shared in the flesh, not virtually. The message enters a public space and competes with the intrusion of commercial directives, the built environment, the weather etc. Our bodies negotiate this information, so the potential for engagement remains.

'Tunnel Vision' then is an acknowledgement of these issues – the participants haven't just built a website (although as a complimentary or alternative strategy this may be valid) – they have gone to the physical site of the critique and intervened using a medium and language related to the rhetoric. It's a digital update for the street poster.

And the simple strategy of comparing relatively inexpensive yet important axed social/environmental/arts projects to the funding of massive infrastructure follies is something that the conservative local media never does.

I hope they can keep it up.