Nov 20, 2012

Bamboo Billboard!


Last year L.A.-based artist Stephen Glassman, who has apparently been making bamboo art installations for two decades, made a small-scale art project called Urban Air that involved a miniature billboard-bamboo setup. After it got some attention, leading billboard-maker Summit Media agreed to donate billboards in busy areas of Los Angeles for the first prototype.
It works by removing the advertisement-ready facade and retrofitting a billboard’s metal husk to contain planters, live bamboo and a watering system. The installation includes environmental sensors and is connected to wifi.
A new Kickstarter project [love the kickstarter connection, I may investigate] is trying to raise $100,000 to hire all the electrical and structural engineers needed to build it. The goal is a bamboo billboard kit that could be installed anywhere.
Imagine if, instead of advertisements screaming about taxes and abortion and Obamacare, we were bathed in soothing placards of calm. Americans are exposed to 5,000 advertisements a day, as Treehugger points out--so this sounds like a welcome reprieve. You can learn more about the project here.

3 comments:

  1. Now that is much more complicated than my window veggies and herbs. LOL. makes me so dumb! I wrecked my car rubber-necking to read a provocative advertisement. So, I'm not a fan of billboards

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  2. I do like some bill boards, as we travel a lot, some are very welcome. One of the things that hit me once in Florida was an over pass on I-75 above Ocala. We went under and I looked in my rear view mirror, "Hey that over pass had trees on it!" I learned later it was a wild-life passage, that was kinda neat.

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