Located in a center traffic island in East Hollywood, this animated LED billboard spectacular breaks the lineage of flat billboard advertisement through a faceted, meteorite-like mass that faces multiple directions at once. This proposal, which deals with the lack of primary viewing directions and angles from five different approaches, forces us to think of street media in a new way, specifically how two-dimensional images can inhabit three-dimensional objects.

Misfit Mapping

Rather than mapping individual pieces of content onto the nine faceted surfaces, images are projection-mapped onto the whole mass from three locations, creating moments where the content aligns to create giant images across the mass. This also creates some distortion of the content, from different points of view, asking more of the viewer and confounding instantaneous consumption of content. Colors, type styles, and other atmospheric qualities bleed over the object, giving glimpses of media that viewers have maybe seen before on social media or television, making vicarious sensible connections.

Glitchy Involution

On its north facing side towards the pedestrian street-life of North Vermont Avenue, the Media-orite has a massive involution, revealing the object to be hollow. The inner surfaces of the involution are further degraded and mapped on surfaces turning legible advertising into patterns of animated, glitchy stripes that draw the viewer’s attention. The everyday real of advertising becomes a spatial black hole, unsettling what we thought a billboard could do.

The Media-orite hits the ground on a single point, leaving behind a trench where it might have crash landed.

Location: Los Angeles, California
Client: East Hollywood BID
Builder / Operator: Orange Barrel Media