Crossings

September 7, 2021

Crossings

A mystery presented as a podcast with eBay links for clues.

Link to Spotify (Project’s Point of Entry)

Additional Project Links:

My theme was Bridge Infrastructure through the lens of “maintenance.” This brought me to a more refined theme of Wildlife Crossings. Wildlife crossings are infrastructure built for animals to connect environments which have been bisected by highway infrastructure. They are wildly understood to be a great idea for multiple stakeholders, across disparate interest groups. By providing a pathway for animals to safely cross roads and highways, wildlife crossings reduce vehicular accidents which cause harm to animals, humans, and the highways. They are an effective, relatively low-cost solution to the problem of roadkill, and can help maintain animal ecosystems and communities.

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Process

In conjunction with the research, I explored a wide range of forms and what they might convey. I tried to do a mini project for each week that I was working on this theme. While the forms themselves varied greatly from the end result, the making of them heavily influenced my positioning and interests as they relate to final work. The mini projects were a comic about alligators tearing down a school, a no-language user flow experiment called Get On My Lawn, and an attempt at a desire path sculpture which didn’t really make anything other than a mess.

The above explorations brought me to the writing of a short poem:

Why did the chicken cross, we ask. Why did they just not stay.

What pushed this one into the road, whilst these other hens just lay?

Egged on to see what's out there? that mysterious other side?

Our reasons for thinking this or that, our unspeaking spirit guide.

Guided to our daily bread or kept away from harm

Why the chicken chose to make that trek, away from our cozy farm

A riddle better phrased it seems, not why they crossed but how

A bridge, a tunnel, a crossing guard. The power to cross is now.

I liked the silliness of the tone and content, and felt like this was at last a direction worth pursuing. When thinking about how poems are presented, I looked at the “Golden Age of Illustration,” a time period when printed ephemera made high-quality illustration and artwork available for the home. Beautifully illustrated and printed poems about advice, life, or mothers are still in existence, which might be a reflection of how common these artworks were at the time. This form contains a wealth of visual language, while also being conceptually related to the idea of “maintenance.” These little reminder poems serve to help us maintain some quality about our lives, and remind others that these are the types of people we want to be.

Graduation print from etsy, used as font and visual reference

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With some feedback and provocation from my group and from Sarah, I started to think about how the should actually be presented. As a poem, the acoustics of the work are very important, but the visual language was helping me establish a history. I also started to look more at the time period when these poems were most common. While wildlife crossings were first introduced in the 1960s, the problem that they address was actually introduced in the 1916 - 1930 range, which has a nice parity with the form I was investigating. It also helped me establish a positioning, on what is a rather agreeable topic. A problem with wildlife crossings is that they weren’t created contemporaneously with the explosive growth of highway, road, and pedestrian infrastructure.

This led me to a fascinating deep dive into the history of roadkill. I was specifically interested in getting a better understanding of what is was like to be apart of a world that was suddenly shifting to cars as the predominate form of transportation. I wanted to understand why the problem of animal infrastructure wasn’t addressed at the onset, from a place of empathy and not anger. What were the standards, priorities, and attitudes at the time? I spent an afternoon going through the NYTimes’ TimesMachine, and looking for articles related to animal/vehicle accidents or interactions between 1916 and 1926. This research is collected here, but here are some highlights and takeaways:

If a deer was hit, it was common to report where the deer meat was being donated, whether a local hospital or prison.
Car horns and crosswalks were controversial.
There were a lot of articles related to how people and cars were learning to interact. Some interesting/influential ones:
A write-up about a cautious chauffeur gave terrific insight into the common rules of the road, which at the time were more socially-enforced rather than legally.
There was also a write-up from a psychologist advocating for the removal of car horns, saying that they were helpful when cars were new, but now we all can learn to just look for them.
This article from 1926, blames an ice cream truck for letting melted portions into the street, causing deer to come lick which were then hit by a car.
There’s a story from 1924, about character witnesses attesting on behalf of a dog which caused an accident.
This absolutely wild 1923 story about a traveling salesman who tried to hunt a bear with his car, and failing miserably at it.
There were reports that cited the commonness with which birds were found dead in the road. This seems to be counter to what I observe from driving around. This is purely conjecture, but it made me wonder if birds have generationally learned how to interact with human infrastructure. If so, why haven’t other animals? As far as highways are concerned, there was no infrastructure available for them to even learn. There was no way for them to cross.

Taking in all of this information, feedback, and where I was with the project led me to think about the little poem that I had written. Questions about presentation (Sarah asked if a billboard would make sense, an idea I ended up borrowing) got me thinking about this poem. Who would have written a poem related to animals / animal crossings in the 1920s. Why would they have written it? If there is a scenario where someone would have written something like that, what else could be true about that person and the world in which they live? I wanted to connect the time period of the problem with the time period of our solutions, and I needed to present them in today’s world and context.

With three points in time to speak to, I decided to create one artifact for each period. Doing the visual research for the 1920s and 60s brought me to eBay. Spending time on the platform doing visual research, showed me a very natural place for these disparate items to co-exist. While I debated photoshopping the work to look like eBay pages, I felt it was easier and more interesting to just create the pages themselves. The idea of accidentally stumbling into a story felt similar to stumbling through the woods, and suddenly finding a path.

With the artifacts and eBay pages built, I got some additional feedback from Sarah and my partner, Mike. Both brought up interesting points for me to develop and clarify. I came to understand that there was a bit too much of a mystery. The objects were intentionally subtle in their abnormality and presentation. You would have to an expert in multiple different fields to notice and appreciate why the objects were interesting. I came up with the idea of a podcast, which could serve as the viewers point of entry, and allow me to better express my particular point-of-view on the subject. At this point, I was full-on laughing about where this project was going, and it was joyful to let it continue to grow towards more ridiculousness.

After recruiting some family members to voice act, I was able to put together a fake trailer for a fake podcast about a fake mystery revolving around fake eBay listings for fake items from a fake version of our real world. When building out the assets for the podcast and trailer, there were some interesting opportunities to add to the developing narrative with episode notes, updates, and descriptors. In all of the moments, dealing with non-traditional forms was really fun and provided avenues to include more details and push the “reality” I was inventing even further.

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User Questions

Did the mystery capture your attention?
Where you bothered by the levels of abstraction away from the topic?
If you had no context, what would you think the intention of the project was?
Did it make you laugh?
Were you drawn into the story?
Do you see a connection to the theme of “maintenance”

Questions About Making

How do you evaluate research-based artwork?
How do you appropriately credit the research, references, and influences when it’s about the collective information, rather than specific?
How do you know if you are making an actual connection or just talking yourself into seeing something in what you are doing?