Messages from TFL & Other Experiments

A series of experiments that started with trying to add some intrigue into a mundane rountine. By superimposing the 2 x 3 format of the shutter telegraph onto 3 rows of London bus seats, and documenting the movement of passengers sitting around me, I attempted to create meaning and messages out of random acts.

In the second set of experiments, a computer generated (as opposed to bus generated) sequence is documented and translated. In both of these scenarios above, I concluded that the world indeed did not have anything concrete to say to me. Alas there was no serendipitous message to be had.

The last experiment allows the reverse, for coherent messages to be typed and displayed as an incoherent sequence - since the shutter telegraph is pretty much a defunct of communication - of shapes. Throughout these small exercises, I treated language as a somewhat malleable material, and although my semi-random selection from this array of symbols did not form any actual interpretable information, the possibility that it would injected a small moment of excitment to my daily commute.