Networked LCD screens to turn bus stops into art galleries

Written on 9th June 2009                                                                                                              10 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester

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.

art, london, olympics

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China’s earthquake online after shock: Sina goes English

Written on 19th May 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

China’s most popular news and sports site Sina has launched an English version to provide international readers with the latest on the earthquake that took 32.000 lives and made millions of people homeless. Sina president and CEO Charles Chao told AFP: “We have chosen to launch our English news site now as we would like to provide up-to-minute coverage of the earthquake for overseas people who are concerned about the tragedy”. Quite a digital after shock, if you’d ask me. But just a nasty little thought here, is it really an aftershock? Or does a media hype, how terrible it may be, comes in handy for China’s leading portal?

Chao: “Over the longer term, we intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China-related information and to have better understanding about modern China.” Right, there it is. Sina is just an ordinary media giant with a healthy ambition: to conquer the world. Revenues are expected to grow with 30 percent over the next few years, thanks to the Olympics, so Chao and his executives probably aren’t afraid of investing some capital in international expansion.

You don’t here me complain though. I’m sure there are some Sina editors that genuinely want to tell the world how their fellow citizens are suffering. Yet I just don’t buy the noble words by Chao.

china, News, news site, olympics, online news, sina

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