Façade ideas

Digital billboards are fast replacing/have replaced the tri-vision billboard, heralding big brands such as these for the digital age. Although the potential for digital billboards is virtually limitless, most tend to show the same few adverts as their mechanical predecessors i.e. data output remains the same. Maybe call it futureproofing.

The relationship between billboard and brand is identifiable to everyone and could be curiously explored by way of Oxford Probation Service as Brand. The mechanical action of each rotation always evokes a sense of yearning and anticipation from the viewer in a borderline hypnotic fashion, often turning to display a vacuous marketing directive/political incentive that often makes watching the mechanical action far more appealing than seeing the uniform whole. The juxtaposition of posters contrasting in implication could be used in a very provocative manner, or a success-story narrative could reside on the rotating pillars. Messages could be changed on a regular basis, although the laborious method of application perhaps needs to be developed.

The following artists have taken the billboard as object and attempted to embody it with meaning beyond that of the superficial.

Jennifer Marmant & Daniel Borins "In Sit You" 2006

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset "This Place Can't Be Yours" 2006

The collaboration between Levi's and artist Stefan Sagmeister is a reinterpretation of the trivision billboard.

The notion of facade as data projection, shelter, brise soleil is I believe, systematically close to that of billboards, which do indeed project data and can easily be reimagined as brise soleil. And thoughtful extrusion in the third dimension could possibly provide an element of shelter...