BACKGROUND

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

Around 15,000 in the UK alone and growing at an exponential rate, 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, with further substantial digital waste when a digital billboard’s life has ended.  

Not only are we watching them, they are now capable of watching us by tracking mobile phones, creating bespoke adds.

THE DIGITAL SUN

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 refelcting on the ephemoral nature of time, culture and memory.

For The Digital Sun, the focus is on outdoor digital billboards.  Normally, there are 3-4 different rolling ads on any one digital billboard, which rotate and repeat over a 60-second cycle.  By exposing for that length of time against a night-time sky,  the screen is rendered blank, making their message redundant. By creating these blank screens, the ads are subverted & rendered null and void, allowing viewers to project their own personal meaning onto them.

The resulting images glow ominously in the night-time deserted streets, empty car parks and semi-industrial landscapes, evoking a dystopian mood, where billboards can both observe and transmit. These deserted streets with giant screens bring to mind an Orwellian state of night time curfews, where billboards have temporarily stopped transmission only to resume again in the morning.

The final images will be on shot large-format 8 x 10 film, creating work that is as imposing in scale as the billboards themselves, but have a fine art aesthetic.  The resultant images are both intended as large scale fine art gallery prints, as well as bespoke prints intended for showing on outdoor billboards. By bringing images back to the billboards themselves, The Digital Sun – like Felix Gonzalez Torres’s ‘BILLBOARD’ series –  aims to blur private and public spheres.

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.   

* The images shown here are a work in progress taken in digital format, and are test shots, not the final images.

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