BACKGROUND

There are some 15,000 outdoor digital advertising screens in the UK alone. They include anything from digital roadside billboards to smaller bus shelter screens and are growing at an exponential rate.

Their invasive nature is alarming. Unlike ads on personal screens, digital billboards cannot be turned off and remain brightly illuminated 24/7. 

Bright enough to overcome the sun’s glare, they can be seen for miles around. The digital billboards in Times Square are, in fact, so bright that they can be seen from outer space. Their constant glare not only invades our subconscious, but it’s significant light pollution also disrupts the orientation, breeding and foraging of nocturnal wildlife.

The cost to power them is significant – just one digital billboard can cost up to thirty times the energy of an average household per year. Compared to traditional billboards, they are incredibly wasteful, the latter costing a mere fraction of that per annum. Not only that, but there is also significant digital waste when a digital billboard’s life has ended.  

THE DIGITAL SUN

The Digital Sun, like the billboards themselves, aims to shine a light on the invasive nature of digital billboards.

Inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s poetic ‘Theatre’ series, where Sugimoto took the lens cap off his large format camera at the start of a film in an empty cinema, and replaced it by the end of the film, creating a series of exquisite, bright, glowing cinema screens.

Each image in effect contains an entire film, reflecting on the ephemeral nature of time, on memory and culture, as well as the historical architecture of cinemas.

For The Digital Sun, a similar method is used, but this time the focus is on outdoor digital billboards.  Normally, there are 3-4 different ads on any one digital billboard, which rotate and repeat over a 60-second cycle.  By exposing for that length of time, the screen is rendered blank, making their message redundant. 

The resulting images glow ominously in the night-time deserted streets, empty car parks and semi-industrial landscapes, evoking a dystopian mood. Each image will be named after the ads contained in the frame (eg, Bank of Scotland, Netflix, Asda), date stamped, and have an estimate of their yearly power consumption.   

By creating these blank screens, the ads are rendered null and void, with each image effectively blanking out the advertisements, subverting their message.

These images are a work in progress taken in digital format.  The final images will be on large-format 8 x 10 film, creating work that is as imposing in scale as the billboards themselves.

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