SIGNS

“SIGNS” is an experimental film and public artwork that challenges us to rethink the critical messages we often overlook in urban environments. This piece compels us to confront the hidden environmental impacts of our daily activities, such as the relentless use of cars and their significant carbon emissions.

The film and artwork urge us to imagine how urban signs could more effectively communicate the interconnectedness of technology, climate change, rising sea levels, and natural disasters. These issues are intricately linked, yet rarely highlighted in the signage that fills our cities.

“SIGNS” pushes the boundaries of informational spaces, advocating for signs that promote social justice, question the pervasive collection and sale of our personal data, and alert us to the potential infringement of our rights through everyday consumer choices. The film and artwork invite us to envision signage that prompts deeper reflection on societal issues and the pervasive impacts of modern technologies.

With their potential for immediate and impactful communication, signs can reconnect us to an ancient, pictographic understanding, transcending language barriers to convey universal messages. Drawing on Eduardo Kohn’s insights in “How Forests Think,” the film posits that signs are not mere passive indicators but active prompts for present action, hinting at future consequences.

“SIGNS” invites viewers to scrutinize the messages missing from our daily landscape and question whether the signs around us genuinely serve the public good by warning us of unseen yet impending dangers. It’s a call to rethink the role of signage in our urban spaces and demand more from the information we encounter daily.

SIGNS ARE INTERPRETATIONS THAT TRY TO JUSTIFY THEMSELVES AND NOT THE REVERSE.

• Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.

We often hear, “Driving is a privilege, not a right.” Breaking the rules and ignoring signs can lead to costly tickets, jail terms, and even death. There are immediate dangers, like entering a rail crossing when a train is coming, and long-term risks, such as those posed by smoking, which takes the lives of half of all smokers.

What about signs that warn us of inevitable doom because of car usage and polluting carbon output? What about signs that think more systemically, examining the relationships between global warming, sea level rise, and hurricanes? What about signs that express solidarity, seek social justice, and warn of the potential infringement of our rights through everyday products and facilities?

This begs the question: What signs are we not seeing? Do signs in particular contexts serve the public good by highlighting real future dangers that are not immediately apparent?

These are the signs that warn of less visible present and future threats. While scientists are certain that CO2 leads to global warming and increases hurricanes, signage can make this more apparent with graphics illustrating the dangers. Greenhouse gases, emitted from the tailpipes of cars and trucks, act like a toxic, dirty blanket around Earth, trapping energy in the atmosphere and causing it to warm. More heat means more dangerous hurricanes and tornadoes.

Consider this: oceans absorb the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima nuclear explosions every second. Signs can communicate this alarming fact alongside more familiar road signs.

Signs are ubiquitous, found on roads, in churches, and in stores, each with design characteristics that give them authority, especially within urban zones. They are part of information and knowledge management, aligning with epistemology and equating the right to post a sign with authority. We are aware of these dangers, though sometimes we are not. 

This is especially apparent with surveillance technologies, which often yield poor results that disproportionately impact BIPOC people. Shouldn’t we have signs warning the public of the dangers of algorithms used to label individuals as more criminal or suspect based on biased data sets? 

Phrenology, which used the shape of one’s head to predict criminality, has been discredited, yet we continue down similar paths with biased AI.

Commercial signage fills our cultural landscapes, influencing social beliefs while invoking state-based authority.

Regretfully tech companies have promised governments that artificial intelligence (AI) can identify criminal behavior. Even schools have gotten into looking at children’s faces and sanctioning them for not paying attention by looking at eye gaze if a child is daydreaming and climbing into imagination, then that must be promoted rather than focusing on standardized lessons.

It is clear now that artificial intelligence algorithms have biases built into them, given the data sets are often constructed with the biases built in. However, we continue to go down these roads, beckoning an earlier time when phrenology was thought to offer some way of understanding and predicting behavior based on nothing more than the bumps on and shape of one’s head.

In the new physical reality, the distinction between virtual and real is diminishing as our cars and roads save and sell our data. With “smart cars,” the line between transportation and computers is blurred.

Driving a car now means agreeing to terms of service that include data collection, updates, and sharing your data. Most cars collect vast amounts of data, including GPS location, speed, safety system status, and even voice data, often without explicit consent.

When we drive, simply using the car we are operating, creates a need to accept the terms of service. This means agreeing to live, downloaded updates, or share your data, whether you agree to these downloads or not.

For most cars, the event data recorder (EDR) data, the computer inside the car stores your GPS location, speed, airbag deployments, crash avoidance alerts, impact data, safety system status, braking and swerving/cornering events, seat belt settings, vehicle direction (heading), audio or video information such as information collected from camera images and sensor data and yes voice. The car can collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour, know how much we weigh, and track how much weight we gain.

There are always terms of service online, and how can we even agree to data collected, aggregated, and sold by car companies?

Given cars and their data collection, let us not forget that Dave, the founder of Wendy’s, died at 69 after a long battle with liver cancer.

When you consume fatty or fried foods and pile on the salt, your liver is literally under attack. Let us not forget the poor cows or chickens that get sucked into our industrial food system. The combined total of chickens (19 billion), cows (1.5 billion), sheep (1 billion), and pigs (1 billion) living at any one time are three times higher than the number of people on the planet.

Fifty billion chickens are slaughtered for food yearly – a figure that excludes male chicks and unproductive hens killed in egg production. Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are killed to feed the growing appetite for pork, bacon, ham, and sausages – a number that has tripled in the last 50 years.

Half a billion sheep are taken to slaughter every year. The number of goats slaughtered overtook the number of cows eaten during the 1990s, although the figure for cattle excludes the dairy industry. The environmental cost of our growing appetite for meat is alarming, given the rainforest is now one of the prime locations cattle producers look to satisfy our insatiable desires for beef.

Agriculture is responsible for 10-12% of greenhouse gas emissions. We must also not forget that eating plants, insects, and any living thing are violent to that entity.

Perhaps other signs that have one consider the nature of eating meat or the pure act of eating and what a violent act can be may also help humans understand their complicity in those acts.

We may confront producing meat on factory farms or consuming monocultural potato crops in fries and eating at such restaurants through the intelligent placement of these signs near to where humans consume. Would you eat burgers daily if you knew that one tree was felled in the Brazilian Rainforest? 

Fonts and colors are essential to communicate things like a global warning, danger, or demarcating direction. Color permits the signs to stand out from their background and be more effective with the light reflected off of cars or bike headlamps, further giving them an illuminated power for high-contrast and high legibility.

Given all the pollution poured into our atmosphere each year by the car and truck industry, we also need to have a sign reminding us that the oceans, which absorb the most carbon on earth, produce the most oxygen.

Of course, we are sharing breath with the algae, and we are sharing breath with other humans and animals as well.

As we are driving, we are often also in a state of self-reflection, finding faces in clouds, and what better opportunity to find out what is on your mind than by taking a quick Rorschach Sign Test?

This makes me wonder when we will have drive-through psychiatrist meetings with drive-in hookups that sit on our windows. One could just recline their driver’s seat and have a drive-in movie-style speaker mounted to their window.

Still, before these become standard as drive-through convenience stores, we may just have to let our imaginations go while driving in the quietude of our vehicles.

We have speed traps, and what about mind traps that lead us down neural paths of thought we may not intend or feel comfortable traveling on?

Police can use breathalyzers and speed traps to identify and prove your crime. In the future, we may have portable MRI units to see where your blood is rushing. Let’s hope that is not coming to a TESLA car soon.

Today we have RORSCHACH SIGN TESTS to see what you are thinking – but will you tell us?

In this sign series, I use an alternative model that democratizes the production and exchange of information, with warnings to the public for the public good.

They take a medium controlled by city officials and subvert the use of signs into one that

supports education and our urban communities. This enables knowledge sharing and direct participation.

Then some signs warn of election meddling, and the whole host of new laws that may suppress all from voting.

Let us hope we do not return to that international nightmare. However, we must remember it is our “supreme court” and the misnomer of “citizens United”  where the court’s ruling freed corporations and unions to spend gobs of money on “electioneering communications” and to advocate for the election or defeat of candidates effectively drowning out individual and collective voices of citizens.

My goal with these artworks is to expose a policy, examine authority, and establish accessible technological opportunities that allow knowledge dissemination for the common good.

This helps inform ways and approaches to enable the social and community appropriation of knowledge and communication technologies for local information, production, discussion, and exchange.

When you enter a church, for example, that conjures the figure of MOTHER MARY and appeals to guilt to obey GOD, are you questioning if what you are being told is an immaculate conception or maybe more so an Immaculate Misdirection?

Should guilt be a part of a social strategy to control behavior?