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YELLOW ARROW OVERVIEW

Yellow Arrow is fundamentally a new way of exploring cities. A harbinger of the "geospatial web," Yellow Arrow began in 2004 as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then, Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities globally and become a way to experience and publish ideas and stories via text messaging on your mobile phone and interactive maps online.

The project is built around the general philosophy that every place is distinct and engaging if seen from a unique perspective. With this foundation, Yellow Arrow enables every place to become an attraction. Stories are always tied to unique details such as back-alley murals or unique street markers, as well as classic locations like the Empire State Building in New York or the Reichstag in Berlin. Overall, the aim is for Yellow Arrow to provide a frame and platform to see the world in a new way.

When the project was first introduced in 2004, renowned Stanford archaeologist and cultural theorist Michael Shanks wrote that Yellow Arrow was an example of "deep mapping cultural experience - a cartography of the intimate, the everyday, the monumental, the ephemeral, the epochal."

HOW IT WORKS

Participants place uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects - a favorite view of the city, an odd fire hydrant, the local bar. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow's unique code, Yellow Arrow authors connect a story to the location where they place their sticker. Messages range from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action. When another person encounters the Yellow Arrow, he or she sends its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately receives the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extends this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world.

With mobile technology we are now able to integrate the social potential of networked experience with the immediacy and relevance of the physical world. As Jean Baudrillard writes in response to student strikes in France of May 1968:

"The real revolutionary media were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the handpainted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged - everything that was an immediate inscription, given and turned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street is, in this sense, the alternative and subversive form of the mass media, since it isn't, like the latter, an objectified support for answerless messages, a transmission system at a distance. It is the frayed space of the symbolic exchange of speech - ephemeral, mortal."

In a networked age, different communities across the globe have very different access to technology, but mobile phones have become widely available across all social classes. By perceiving a network as something that is inherently a combination of physical, social, and technological components, the project hopes to bring these elements together under a paradigm that honors the type of vibrant exchange Baudrillard found so inspiring. In October, 2008, this groundbreaking experiment was wrapped-up and all the content generated internationally by hundreds of contributors has been archived in the public domain at Flickr.

CREDITS

Yellow Arrow was developed by Counts Media, Inc. The project grew out of an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists based in New York, Berlin and Gothenburg, with backgrounds in avant-garde theater, documentary performance, site-specific installation, non-linear narrative, experimental cartography, and interactive media. Individually and collaboratively, the group's previous work has been exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Van Alen Institute, New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome.org in New York, Bangkok's Lhumpini Park, Berlin's Volksbühne and German Architecture Center, Art Basel Miami Beach, and Body Weather Farm in Hakusu, Japan, among others.

Creators:

Christopher Allen
Michael Counts
Brian House
Jesse Shapins

Executive Producers:

Howard Pyle
Jonathan Stern

Producers:

Mohammed Abdul-Sattar
Bill Ballou
Lindsay Cook
Dan Check
Elizabeth Ellis
Brian Fehd
Tim Flateman
Geoffrey Guinta
Purva Mande
Jamie McElhinney
Kara Oehler
Nathan Phillips
Karenne Rossi
George Surovov
David Taylor
Tomas Vengris
Erin Wilson

Designers and Developers:

Sidney Blank
Sertan Girgin
Adam Mosseri
Marco Raab
Jean-Marc

Special Thanks:

Paola Antonelli, Marion Barry, Paul Bishow, Gunvor Bottheim, Alec Bourgeoise, Jens Brandt, Leslie Brown, James Burns, Brendan Canty, Kareem Charles, Leslie Clague, Cynthia Connolly, Martin Dahl, Todd D'Amour, Uffe Elbæk, Dante Ferrando, Martin Frandsen, Dennis Frenchman, Kimmy Gatewood, Magne Gisvold, Elizabeth Goodman, Katrina Grigg-Saito, Gesa Henselmans, Sue Huang, Mark Hurst, Henry Jenkins, Eugene Kim, Dave King, Carl-Johan Kjellander, Andreas Knudsen, Joe Lally, Rasmus Laursen Johanna Linsley, Alec Mackaye, Ian Mackaye, Steve Malkesethian, Susan Malkesethian, David Mandl, Pouline Middleton, William J. Mitchell, Sipiwe Moyo, Rehka Murthy, Jeff Nelson, Mats Nordahl, Eric Paulos, Katherine Predstrup, Andrew Prescott, Howard Rheingold, Donna Rouse, Sean Sacks, Hilke Schellmann, Susanne Seitinger, Christina Ray, Francisca Rojas, Katie Salen, Hilke Schellman, Skyler Sullivan, Ian Svenonius, Jenny Tibbels, Jordy Trachtenberg, Kate Vallee, Sudhir Venkatesh, Allison Wolfe