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For
this project I put myself in a position of having total
control over a piece of information. I chose a
phrase, INFORMATION OVERLORD, that I kept secret for the
duration of the project, and constructed the phrase by
sewing together large letters from leftover plastic
packaging. Throughout the construction of the
piece, although I told people I was working on a 'secret
project,' I kept most of the details a secret.
The message was displayed in fragments throughout the
city from 7 - 8:30 AM on Friday, July 2. A crew of
volunteers – none of which knew the full message -
displayed it and documented the project. The
participants who helped me hang the piece throughout the
city were crucial, not only in their participation, but
in their ignorance. In addition to not knowing the
entire message, the participants were given very limited
instructions, and were told not to communicate with each
other.
This piece is an obscure, sideways comment on
transmission and obfuscation of information - how we get
it, where it comes from, how it's conveyed, and whether
we even notice it when it's right in front of us. Our
limited perspectives privilege us to only the tiniest
bits of information, forcing us to try to make sense out
of a scattering of random data points. Anyone
coming into the city that morning who saw the various
pieces of the message may not even have noticed or
interpreted the bits of text as a message, and if they
did, it was almost impossible to see enough pieces of
the message to decipher it or understand its fuller
context.
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The I-5
overpass at Madison St. (facing northbound
traffic) |
The Central
Library |
The Dravus
overpass at 15th Ave. (facing southbound
traffic) |
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