Billboard #451

Inspired by Kelly Richardson's hyperrealistic landscapes often depicting the impossible, Billboard #451 takes viewers on a neverending journey down a highway while being fed video ads. The title is a direct reference to Fahrenheit 451, a novel by Ray Bradbury. In the story, the billboards that adorn the highways are stretched to 200 feet in order for dangerously fast drivers to view them without distortion.

For Billboard #451, I used video as a medium that could be manipulated in Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I selected contemporary commercials that would appeal to the characters in the novel: a Roku 4 ad for the obsession of binge-watching TV series on high-definition screens, and an Audi ad for those who enjoy high-speed joyrides as a form of entertainment. The third billboard frames a public book burning, the most prominent theme of the novel, but from a stationary position the video is incomprehensible to the point where only the fire can be made out. Individuals who do not partake in this sort of activity will see the distorted perspective of the collective.

This video is an exploration on variable form and the perception of space inside a virtually composed environment. According to Lev Manovich's Understanding Hybrid Media, "everything inside the frame keeps changing: visual elements, their transparency, the texture of the image, etc." (Manovich). In the nighttime portion, not only the primary frame contains a view from a moving vehicle, but the two billboards frame separate video tracks, resulting in an endless loop of dynamic imagery. In the daytime portion, the source footage's width and height is stretched to sit along the side of the road while the video plays. The cloud's shadows on the billboard are moving layers of solid colour with varying edge feathering and transparency, adhering to the variable form aspect while contributing to the realistic possibility of gargantuan billboards existing in our world.

I added an audio track to the film from the TV series Black Mirror with enough filters to simulate a radio playing - a speech against society's addiction to the glamour of television and buying intangible objects - drowned out by the noisy traffic. In the end, the speaker is cut off as though they were censored, not unlike the level of censorship that is inherent in Fahrenheit 451's world.


Works Cited:

Lev Manovich – Understanding Hybrid Media, Published in Betti-­Sue Hertz, ed., Animated Paintings (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2007)