Last year at theZeroOne digital art festival artist Ben Rubin unveiled the "San Jose Semaphore" atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose, CA. For a year now, the four rotating LED wheels perplexed everyone who saw it.
The answer to riddle of the wheels has been revealed. The Adobe building is transmitting the entire text of Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49."
The Pynchon book, written in the mid-1960s, is set in a fictional California city filled with high-tech campuses. It follows a woman's discovery of latent symbols and codes embedded in the landscape and local culture, Rubin said.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]