An artist shipped an old South Station departure board to his studio in
Miami, where he plans to use it with a series of transportation-related
paintings.
(Courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon)
Starts & Stops
South Station relic is now modern art
An artist shipped an old South Station departure board to his studio in
Miami, where he plans to use it with a series of transportation-related
paintings.
(Courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon)
A salon of avant-garde artists sipped beers in a downtown Miami studio last weekend, wondering why a 20-foot-wide train scheduling board from Boston was hanging among the half-finished paintings and other works in progress at the party.
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The old South Station train board is no longer a prosaic keeper of commuter rail schedules and track locations. It has entered the heady world of modern art.
"It looks pretty cool in there, dude," said the sign's new owner, George Sanchez-Calderon, a 41-year-old artist.
Sanchez spent thousands of dollars shipping the 2,500-pound sign to his studio, in Miami's Overtown section, and is enthusiastic about its future in contemporary art.
Sanchez spent recent months painting subjects related to transportation: boats, galleys, and hyper-realistic renderings of the Space Mountain roller coaster at Disney World. He's been planning an exhibit themed around the concept of "fight or flight" and the idea that transportation is about "making a choice of where you are."
So he looked around the Internet, and discovered that the MBTA had auctioned its 1980s Solari departure board on
By the time Sanchez called, the board had been sold for $550. But the winning bidder never showed up with a check, and commuter rail officials failed to reach him after several attempts. So they decided to sell it to Sanchez for the same price, as long as he paid the removal costs.
Sanchez will leave the city names intact, but may add some other ideas among the 40 lines of text on the board - like names of corporations and names of people he has known - to broaden the idea of a sense of place.
When he finishes, the artist hopes to hang it in a big public space, rather than someone's home.
"It's not that easy to put in your living room," he said. "You have to really be into it."
High-tech bus stop shelters on the way via MIT
New
bus stop technology and design is often about as exciting as the debut
of a new phone book. But an MIT research group promises something much
sexier, a bus stop that looks and behaves like a sleek computer."Interacting with it will be a little bit like touching an iPhone," said Carlo Ratti, a project designer who leads MIT's Senseable City Laboratory, in an e-mail sent last week from a conference in South Korea.
The EyeStop bus shelter is an attempt to introduce an everyday object from city life into the interactive, digital world. Commuters will be able to map out a trip on the touch screen, check the local temperature, figure out where every bus in the city is, and post an opinion or announcement on a digital bulletin board.
The entire solar-powered structure will glow brighter as a bus gets closer so nearby commuters can pick up their pace.
Ratti said the features and look are designed to be "mass customized" by a computer program, so that each stop fits in with its surrounding architecture. That will be especially important in Florence, Italy, where the group is building a prototype that will be deployed beginning in October. Ratti expects larger scale production in Florence next year.
The prototype will cost $120,000. The price will vary by location and feature after that, he said.
For comparison, the MBTA spends about $15,000 to erect a standard bus shelter and as much as $180,000 for the fancier digital shelters deployed along Washington Street for the Silver Line.
The MBTA's contribution to English
This
month's rear-end crash on the MBTA's Green Line may help coin a rather
unfortunate addition to the English language: "text-end."The online Urban Dictionary, a quirky compendium of neologisms and slang, lists two definitions for "text-end." The first entry involves running out of things to say at the end of a text-messaging conversation.
The second one hits closer to home: "When a text-messaging distracted driver rear-ends the vehicle in front of them. Recently demonstrated by public transit drivers in San Francisco, Texas and Boston."
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