2009-11-08
post/236891470
photo 10:44:00
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.
