Photo by Jason Eppink/Flickr

I was listening last night to Frances Anderton’s interview with agit-prop artist Robbie Conal on KCRW’s Design and Architecture and was quite surprised to hear, out of nowhere, a discussion of traffic lights.

Why? Because, Conal noted, at every intersection in L.A. there are controller boxes for the traffic signals — “virulent spawn of HAL” — I think he said. These, it turns out, make perfect surfaces for displaying things like posters. So Conal, when he was starting up, went out and actually measured the dimensions of these boxes, and created appropriately sized posters (also using Helvetica Bold so that it could be read by drivers). He noted that if a driver missed one at a certain intersection, he could serially repeat them at a number of intersections so he’d be guaranteed a viewing (depending on the cycle timing!)

This makes Conal, I suppose, LADOT’s unofficial ‘artist in residence.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Traffic Wonkery, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.