Off World announcement!

I've been having a lot of mental lapses into absurdity as of late. Last week I was sitting in a car stopped in traffic on I-76, staring out the front window. You could say I was contemplating the skyline. That's when I was struck by the absurdity of billboards. It was the scale that got me first--realizing how enormous a billboard has to be in order to convey a roughly magazine-size readable image at a distance. Consider with me how much physical space has been utilized in order to colonize our fields of vision. It got me thinking about a Gnostic/Platonic mind-body split in which psychological space becomes much more valuable than physical space.

Great architectural constructions have always played on psychological space, but it seems to me that the meaning of that visual space was always a logical extension from the meaning of the actual physical structure: A palace or cathedral was much bigger than it needed to be in order to create in the viewer a sense of grandeur, which is a utilization (a sort of exaggeration) of physical space to make a psychological impression. But what about when a massive structure is erected exclusively to pass on a photograph or written message, completely severed from any physically useful purpose?

The strange dis-proportionality of it all illustrates a general disregard for the physical environment (as in most cities). More broadly, billboards point to a physical existence that is subjugated, discarded, dominated by the world of ideas. Yet another cyclical pattern of careless abuse and fragmented meaning, another competitive relationship enacted between worlds that were meant to be constructively integrated.

Or in the case that my reactions seem more ridiculous than the billboard itself, at the very least we can pause for a moment to think about the great expenditures of creative energy and capital invested into capturing little pieces of our mental space for a few seconds.