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Signal Art

I recently mentioned artist Robbie Conal’s discovery a while back that traffic light signal boxes made the perfect venue for his art in Los Angeles. Via Mike on Traffic, I was intrigued by a public art program in the Texas town of North Richland Hills that turns these overlooked bits of traffic infrastructure into an officially sanctioned canvas (evidently it was also done to preempt graffiti).

The video below, produced by the city’s Art in Public Spaces program, shows some more iterations. I’m all for public art, though I do admit the concept of cars sitting at an intersection being “public space,” while technically true and a fact of life in most of the U.S. (and already realized by people like Conal), still strikes me as a bit odd (particularly since drivers in cars exist in a strange netherworld of coexisting private spaces) — although admittedly the picture above looks like a pretty walkable sort of environment. And how many yellow boxes can you have, anyway?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Etc., Traffic Culture. 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.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

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Random House | Powell’s

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Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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