Your breasts in lights

[j4]

cleanskies reminded me, with a tweet about seeing the word BREASTS on St Paul's Cathedral, that I'd seen that too! It's not that my life is so exciting that I forget about things like seeing the word BREASTS on St Paul's Cathedral, but, you know, a lot's happened since then. There were lots of other words, too, like LOVE and TOAST. If you stand and watch it and pretend you're asking it questions, it's a bit like fortune-telling with Fluxx cards.

I only saw it because I was in London for a conference and as one of the evening entertainments we went on a guided walk. The words on St Paul's came as a complete surprise. A colleague and I spent far longer than we really should have done staring at it, and giggling every time the words were about sex. "It's reading our minds!" Not that we were thinking about sex. Or breasts. Though toast was quite tempting. I managed to get photos of SILENCE and something in Arabic. Not breasts.

Anyway, this finally reminded me to go and look up what it was. It's an installation/project/thing called The Question Mark Inside, by Martin Firrell. (See also the blog.) I wouldn't have gone to London to see it, but I'm quite glad I saw it by accident, especially as it's only on for a short time. He claims the words are user-generated, but obviously he's selective about what he includes, and they're not being submitted in realtime. Wouldn't that be awesome, though, being able to txt your word, or twitter it, or something, and see it appear on St Paul's? What word would you txt?

Comments

[classytart.livejournal.com]

'Plinth'

or maybe 'This'

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

WHOOPS

Back in the 'Boro, we have a much dumber version (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tees/weareteesside/2004/04/spectra/index.shtml) of your application. It probably could be programmed - specifically, it could be a software change rather than a hardware one - to display text rather than just patterns, but you just know that 80% of the time it would be used to display either libellous comments or comments intended to scare passing horses - and, should these be censored, you know that 80% of the time would be spent with people trying to produce the saltiest messages that can survive the filter. (The likes of "PHU Q" and so forth.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Is that an itinerant artwork? I saw something almost identical in Winchester the last time I was there, in about 2005.

[timscience.livejournal.com]

Here you go

From here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/clearbrian/3029937498/).

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Someone needs to 'shop that photo to put two domes next to each other....

[sbp.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a project I once saw which was essentially a torch-shaped projector built around a mobile phone. You could text the phone and it would project the words wherever it was sited. Not really got the power for St Pauls though....