Always outnumbered. Generally overdresssed.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Installation 3/135 - Camera phone, blog, scrolling billboard




Ok, this is the third in my series of 135 relational art pieces, created using this blog, my camera phone and existing advertising media.

This one is called, "Once I thought I understood."

It's based on a scrolling poster which is visible to one side of the tube tracks if you gawp upwards outside Ladbroke Grove station in west London. As you can see, the first poster features the gnomic headline "You can't smell a city from a coach" - while you stand there, trying to work out what that could mean, perhaps contemplating the fin de siècle obscurity of modern advertising, the roller rolls over and you get the other poster, this totally incoherent ideogram advertising McCain's oven chips - the result, no doubt, of Trevor Beattie's hiring a creative department entirely from the JLS fanbase.

As it rolls back and forth over your mind, like a subnormal groundsman trying to flatten a tortoise into a cricket square, you may find your stream of consciousness assuming a strange pitch of bewilderment.

so the sunflower, shines on a a potato, which falls like but surely from a plane you can't falls like rain? But why is that because generally I go on a smell holiday I assume it's suggesting a natural process and yet actually a grey hound bus holiday in the US potato, but damp like chips

So the installation is now open - go along, stand there outside Ladbroke Grove station feeling hopeless, maybe even have your fancy multimedia PDA phone nicked by someone who, let's face it, needs it even less than you do.

3 comments:

Ben Kay said...

Yes, I had trouble with the BA one. If you can't smell a city from a coach, you really can't smell one from a plane. And why would you want to smell a city anyway? They all smell of exhaust, dirt, tramps, urine and corpses. And that point where it rains for the first time in ages, that's when it smells so bad you wish (if BA is correct) that you were on a coach.

Anonymous said...

i agree, the BA poster is absolute nonsense and the McCains isnt much better either. and that JLS fanbase comment is very funny.

Anonymous said...

I agree with the BA poster comment - I didn't get it at first or second or even third time. It's a little far fetched. I only mused over it because I was intrigued in what was it actually trying to say. I wonder how many every day commuters actually 'get it'. It's advertising business class, by the way.

BMB's poster is a little easier to digest once you see their TV ad - good weather good chips. Maybe could've been better art directed.