Yellow Arrow
2004
Brian House, Jesse Shapins, Christopher Allen

[ documentary video by Christopher Allen ]

6864 arrows, placed in 467 cities in 38 countries

Yellow Arrow is a global public art project that subverts the hierarchy of media power by creating an open forum for communication. The project invites the questions "When does an object become art? What makes a landmark? Who says what counts?" By collecting and sharing places of personal significance, this public collaboration creates a subjective atlas called dynamic MAAP (Massively Authored Artistic Project) that expresses the unique characteristics, personal histories, and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces.

Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects — a favorite view of the city, an odd fire hydrant, the local bar. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, Yellow Arrow authors essentially save a thought on the spot where they place their sticker. Messages range from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. When another person encounters the Yellow Arrow, he or she sends its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately receives the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extends this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world.

With mobile technology we are now able to integrate the social potential of networked experience with the immediacy and relevance of the physical world. As Jean Baudrillard writes in response to student strikes in France of May 1968:

The real revolutionary media were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the handpainted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged - everything that was an immediate inscription, given and turned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street is, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media, since it isn’t, like the latter, an objectified support for answerless messages, a transmission system at a distance. It is the frayed space of the symbolic exchange of speech - ephemeral, mortal.

In a networked age, different communities across the globe have very different access to technology, but mobile phones have become widely available across all social classes. By perceiving a network as something that is inherently a combination of physical, social, and technological components, the project hopes to bring these elements together under a paradigm that honors the type of vibrant exchange Baudrillard found so inspiring.

view project website



Thanks to
Eugene Kim

Exhibition

Design and the Elastic Mind
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NYC
2008 February



Press

WIRED
2004 September

New York Times
2006 January 25

Taiwan Daily News
2006 April

Washington Post
2005 July 2

Newsweek
2005 March

The Boston Globe
2005 April 18

Metropolis
2005 February