Plastic Poetics: Notes on the Blacktop
Driving throughout Georgia we are escorted by the rhythmic beat of road signage, and billboards. Words and images crash into and slide off our screen as we consume the blacktop. Forming mirages of desire; saccharine assurances, sanguine smiles, choleric commodities, and slipstreams of salvation.
Borne out of the waves of pioneers that swept this land over 400 years ago, is this billboard frontier now the “American Dream”?
Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, we “botanize the asphalt” looking for interactions between these signs and the people that make up this culturally rich and diverse part of America.
Seeking out potential resistance to the didactic monologue that fills our view we find an alternative. Interrupting the florid cacophony of multimillion-dollar corporate rhetoric, black and white flexible signs give a local voice, in style and message. These no-less persistent signs banter both secular and non-secular offerings. Illuminations such as “All you can eat gizzards & livers”, “Walk with Jesus, run from the Devil” and “God Bless America,” promise sustenance for the belly and/or the soul.
We invite you to voice your own signs using the letters and ready-made words. Recorded and displayed, your “Notes on the Blacktop”, will open up an alternative topography – individual voices in contrast to the otherwise homogenous corporate and monitored terrain of the motorized landscape. Perhaps offering a re-visioning of the “American Dream”, with personal impressions, reactions and desires.
Alongside this playful intervention, a puppet (Oscar) on display reveals an overtly labor intensive mechanization for it’s simple trajectory forward. This suggests the elaborate systems of mobility otherwise unseen. Oscar is both a distraction on the journey and a stand in for us as our movements on the blacktop are controlled and modulated as if we too were on strings, both the consumer and the consumed.
Special thanks to:
Southern Polytechnic State University
Columbus State University
Chaves Procope (technician)
Hannah Israel
Yeon Jin Kim
Scott Tippens
Driving throughout Georgia we are escorted by the rhythmic beat of road signage, and billboards. Words and images crash into and slide off our screen as we consume the blacktop. Forming mirages of desire; saccharine assurances, sanguine smiles, choleric commodities, and slipstreams of salvation.
Borne out of the waves of pioneers that swept this land over 400 years ago, is this billboard frontier now the “American Dream”?
Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, we “botanize the asphalt” looking for interactions between these signs and the people that make up this culturally rich and diverse part of America.
Seeking out potential resistance to the didactic monologue that fills our view we find an alternative. Interrupting the florid cacophony of multimillion-dollar corporate rhetoric, black and white flexible signs give a local voice, in style and message. These no-less persistent signs banter both secular and non-secular offerings. Illuminations such as “All you can eat gizzards & livers”, “Walk with Jesus, run from the Devil” and “God Bless America,” promise sustenance for the belly and/or the soul.
We invite you to voice your own signs using the letters and ready-made words. Recorded and displayed, your “Notes on the Blacktop”, will open up an alternative topography – individual voices in contrast to the otherwise homogenous corporate and monitored terrain of the motorized landscape. Perhaps offering a re-visioning of the “American Dream”, with personal impressions, reactions and desires.
Alongside this playful intervention, a puppet (Oscar) on display reveals an overtly labor intensive mechanization for it’s simple trajectory forward. This suggests the elaborate systems of mobility otherwise unseen. Oscar is both a distraction on the journey and a stand in for us as our movements on the blacktop are controlled and modulated as if we too were on strings, both the consumer and the consumed.
Special thanks to:
Southern Polytechnic State University
Columbus State University
Chaves Procope (technician)
Hannah Israel
Yeon Jin Kim
Scott Tippens
