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Presence:

TAXI (2003-04)
Project Credits: HAHA collective Taxi is a car with a digital advertising sign attached to the roof. Linked to a global positioning system, the message changes relative to the cars location, addressing specific neighborhoods, addresses, and audiences. The technology can target an area as small as a square block. Haha solicited messages through email list serves and through direct contact with various groups throughout the city. The animated messages are pre-programmed in a computer integrated into the cabs architecture. Messages come from people who live in a chosen area (This is the best neighborhood ever (except for the gangs), I want to send a shout out to my mom and dad West town in Chicago); or from someone who wants to intervene in the assumptions of a specific place (Go home Wal-mart in front of a Wal-mart big box store). Messages range between the political and the personal (Dont mess with my Fro, We need jobs not war, Hi Honey!). Instead of promoting products, Taxi uses the technology to voice the thoughts and opinions of citizens and groups as the car travels through city neighborhoods.1 The Project necessitated building a relationship with the participating community by collaborating with neighborhood groups and the community of local taxi drivers. The data was crowd-sourced and, although this process usually involves a remote relationship with the participants, this project started as a hands-on http://www.hahahaha.org/projTaxi.html

Signages with messages contributed by community

The Taxi with location sensitive signage

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Presence: TAXI
interaction with the people who contributed. This built up the narrative of the project from the very beginning and it was these very same people who later became the primary audience. Although the data could have been collected without any personal or physical interaction, this alternative approach highlights the idea propagated by British sociologist Steve Woolgar, that virtual interactions are more meaningful when based on some material reality.2 As participants/spectators, the community collectively created a spatial narrative that that represented the emotional, social, political, historical geography of their neighborhood. By doing so, they participated in altering an urban narrative that is usually shaped by the government, by larger economic and political interests3, and created a collective identity for their community. The tactic of using Taxi signage also reinforced this act by using a medium that is usually used for advertising to impose ideas, as a way of sharing ideas that are contributed by people. The contributions ranged from casual messages, to personal, political comments. Through this diversity and lack of censorship, the project created an open platform for democratic participation. As the Taxis moved from one locality to the other, the messages, displayed as colorful graphic visuals, flashed at specific locations. While these messages

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Presence:

TAXI
may have given visitors and passersby a glimpse into the life of the community, the residents, as contributors as well as spectators, were able to see their locality from a new perspective, through the stories shared by their neighbors. The project facilitated an indirect yet powerful exchange of thoughts and ideas within the community. The taxis created a mobile, ephemeral public domain, opening up the public space as a place for multiple meanings and identities, and, at the same time, through the sequence of messages displayed along the taxi route, built a collective narrative for the community. The project creates a possible imagination of a future where all public signage/displays will be democratically selected or contributed by citizens. We are already at a point in time where this information exists as an invisible layer embedded in a virtual web of location specific information, contributed by the users of the cybernetic city and readable through smart phones and PDAs. How can this virtual platform for voice and expression be translated into a practice that democratizes the emotional, cultural, social, political and spatial landscape of the city, by encouraging citizens to exert their presence within urban psychogeography? The Taxi project temporarily activated the city, and in the process triggered the need to find a sustainable solution for this vision.

1 HAHA website (http://www.hahahaha.org/projTaxi.html) 2 Steve Woolgar, ed., Virtual Society? Technology Cyberbole, 3 Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Henri LeFebvre, Production of Space (Blackwell 1991)