Thursday, November 19, 2009

pulled from friend of friend of friend's blog

From synecdoche on Flickr, an art project in Houston: Using 13 billboards along the city´s downtown freeways, Olivier will replace the usual advertisements with images of the urban landscape that would be visible if the billboard did not exist - the sky, trees, and buildings obstructed by the ads will now be “revealed.”  Having been to the southern US, I can certainly recognise the pattern synecdoche describes in the description of another photo of a billboard from the project: Houston is a city of billboards and big signs, sprouting everywhere above the highways in gleaming, glaring, blinking, clashing profusion. A billboardless vista is rare; in traffic-dense commuter areas there are so many that they cancel each other out, becoming visual background noise. Even on a relatively deserted stretch of highway there will be at least one or two every half-mile or so. That makes this project, time-limited though it is, even more wonderful.

From synecdoche on Flickr, an art project in Houston:

Using 13 billboards along the city´s downtown freeways, Olivier will replace the usual advertisements with images of the urban landscape that would be visible if the billboard did not exist - the sky, trees, and buildings obstructed by the ads will now be “revealed.”

Having been to the southern US, I can certainly recognise the pattern synecdoche describes in the description of another photo of a billboard from the project:

Houston is a city of billboards and big signs, sprouting everywhere above the highways in gleaming, glaring, blinking, clashing profusion. A billboardless vista is rare; in traffic-dense commuter areas there are so many that they cancel each other out, becoming visual background noise. Even on a relatively deserted stretch of highway there will be at least one or two every half-mile or so.

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