The Digital (Eagle) Eye in the Sky

You probably haven't heard, but there's a movie coming out called Eagle Eye with Mutt from Indiana Jones and the girl who had half her face cut off in the Maid of Honor billboards, directed by the guy who accidentially remade Rear Window without realizing it.

Eagle Eye is about this all-seeing, all-knowing, tech-savvy shadow organization that controls people by ruining their lives. Or so the trailers tell me. To promote the film, all over LA they've put up digital billboards near big intersections that say things like "La Brea and Olympic: If you want to live, you will obey. Eagle Eye." and "Overland and Venice: If you want to live, you will obey. Eagle Eye." And so on. I have no strong feelings about the ads, but those digital billbaords are cool and they've given Dan and me a great idea for public-installation art.

Here's what we'd like to do: Buy some ad space on digital billboards, and set up traffic cameras by them so we can see the cars sitting in traffic near the signs. We'll get a license plate number of some car sitting in traffic, and somebody with a computer hooked up to the billboard will feed that license number into a message saying something like "Red Chevy Malibu, License Number 5VRU946. Your lights are on." Or "Black Ford Ranger, License Number 3FGW553. You are getting a parking ticket." These would be lies, of course, and hopefully very confusing to the drivers in question. We could also tap into the California DMV database to get the names of the people the cars are registered to, and get their names worked in. "Dan Knight, yes, you in the BMW 325i, your boss is trying to reach you." Or, "Chris Henderson, yes, you in the Prius, your wife Nancy just left your house with the pool boy." Things like that.

The real coup de grace, though, would be creating fake AMBER Alerts, things that read "Child Abduction In Progress...(insert make, model, and license number of the car directly in front of you)." If one purpose of art is to make people uncomfortable (and it sure can be!), then we think this is just the trick. I know it's not nice, but hey, we're Surrealists, not a couple of guys going around handing out Girl Scout Cookies.

So we're looking for funding for that. We're looking at you, NEA.

Vince out.

PS. We do recognize there would be a certain degree of Surreality in Dan and I -- two adult men with rapidly-evolving facial hair and a talent for non sequitur -- randomly handing out Girl Scout Cookies, but we feel the point remains valid.