Imagine walking along a street and a crowd of people stand before you, some laughing, some with their heads down and clicking away on the keypad of their cell phones. Speech bubbles are seen on a building wall above your field of vision, an artist hands you a thin piece of paper with a phone number on it. He says, "Send a text message to this address and it will appear on the wall above." The project is called, "Txtual Healing" and artist, Paul Notzold is the creator of this interactive, textual experience.
Click the link above to read more of my review of Txtual Healing by Brooklyn New York artist, Paul Notzold.
2 comments:
Hi Bryn, thanks so much for the write up on the project, you do a very good job of painting the picture of the scene, though I think we differ on a few of your conclusions. I thought I'd address one of your comments...
"After asking Paul about this project" (the nike SMS project) ", he replied in a rather defensive tone of voice, ìMy work is totally differentî. This is not a compelling argument and from experience, Txtual Healing is not a new or original idea."
Just to clarify. The nike project is commercial, which means it's filtered and possibly staged to have pro-nike messages go up every once in a while, or at least have pre-made messages go up to make it look more 'lively.' And to make it look like people are really engaging the billboard. Also, though I've never seen the nike project, my guess is that there wasn't much of a context into which to display your message. The idea behind my project is to remove the message from the sender and put it into the context of the piece or vessel that I create. Yup, SMS to display projects have been happening since 2001, all starting with 'Speakers Corner' in England, which was an SMS poetry contest. But few SMS projects do anything more than put your message on a screen or a wall or a display, and now with branding. I should hope it is clear that I don't do this work with branding in mind. And my motivations behind it are to fight the messages that branding and advertising send out into the world. Giving the person in the street a chance to say something back uncensored.
Another project that you may want to check out is Simple txt by Family Filter. An excellent example of combining SMS with imagery pulled from Google search.
Anyway, thank you for the write up. And I hope I have clarfied a bit more on why I think an advertisement and my work are different.
Thanks,
p
Wow! Paul himself posted in response - how neat!
Very interesting project to focus on. I'm cursious about the software used to make it all happen :)
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