"Thirty Feet above the Ground: Media and Visuality in the City"
Billboards occupy a very specific spatial zone in the city, distinct from the built environment around them. Twenty to Thirty feet above the ground is the spatial datum of the billboard in the city, positioned optimally to be seen from a distance, removed from the distractions of the street, placed to have visual dominance, primarily for drivers. Billboards use the city fabric as scaffolding on which messages and images are mounted and become a superstructure of visuality that cantilevers over the corridors of the city. Billboard placement responds to the perspectival relationship between the observer and the city grid, creating two distinct, yet intertwined spatial systems; one on the ground plane and one hovering above.
By exploring the architecture of vision, advertising, and the city, the body of photo montage and sculpture work titled "Thirty Feet above the Ground" makes tangible the visual space occupied by advertising which is distinct from looking at an advertising image by itself. The perspectival cones of vision that are presented in the artwork join observer and billboard and depict the structure or architecture of vision that reveals the intentionality of the billboard advertiser. With billboards, strategic positioning is achieved not only with visual devices, but also with marketing, census and traffic data to target specific socio-economic demographics with in the city. In effect this represents the billboard itself engaged in the act of looking or surveilling the public, which poses troubling questions about the use of public space that the artwork seeks to explore. |
