This article was published on June 9, 2009

Networked LCD screens to turn bus stops into art galleries


Networked LCD screens to turn bus stops into art galleries

Londoners may soon have something new to look while they travel around the city. A plan has been announced that would allow people to upload their own works of art to a website and have them displayed on the rooftops of bus shelters around the city.

The Bus.Tops project would see the tops of sixty four bus stop shelters around London removed and replaced by networked LCD screens, visible from both above and below. Anyone will be able to upload their artwork to the Bus.tops website and, providing it gets enough votes, have it displayed on the bus stop of their choice.

Photographs, paintings, cartoons; there are some great possibilities here. Even larger ideas would be possible too. How about a game of hockey played across London via the LCD screens? Bus.tops is encouraging this kind of thinking. If the scheme gets the go-ahead well-known artists would also be invited to submit work.

Bus.Tops is the brainchild of Alfie Dennen. No stranger to grand artistic statements, he spent the tail-end of last year asking people to upload photographs of themselves holding stones as part of the world’s biggest ‘Geoglyph‘. A collaboration with former BBC Creative Archive Director Paula Le Dieu, Bus.Tops aims to get Londoners to engage with their city in a refreshingly social way.

The proposal has been submitted to the London 2012/Arts Council fund Artists Taking the Lead, and would tie in with London hosting the Olympic Games in 2012.

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