the visual voice

The Visual Voice is a mouth­piece for urban causes. This ongo­ing pub­lic project per­son­al­izes and social­izes the urban land­scape, pro­vok­ing a rene­go­ti­a­tion between city and cit­i­zen. It’s meant to pro­voke con­ver­sa­tion as well as chal­lenge the pri­va­ti­za­tion of our visual envi­ron­ment. If YOU could repro­gram the HOLLYWOOD sign, or the YAHOO! sign in SOMA, what would it say? Where would you say it?

The Visual Voice is really just a portable, demo­c­ra­tic bill­board. Its strength lies within its sim­plic­ity. It’s made of repur­posed elec­tron­ics from nearby offices and con­fig­ured geo­met­ri­cally for mak­ing pub­lic state­ments. It’s a reman­i­fes­ta­tion of the pub­lic forum– a grass­roots broad­cast in a city where so many sub­or­di­nated cit­i­zens strive to be heard. It’s a sim­ple con­duit for com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the scale of the landscape.

In the case of San Fran­cisco, mod­ern urban ‘renewal’ has left tens of thou­sands of its res­i­dents unable to afford basic shel­ter. How is it that a city as eco­nom­i­cally pros­per­ous socially pro­gres­sive as ours
can still not ade­quately address the most basic human needs of its cit­i­zens? It is clear that ‘renewal’ in San Fran­cisco does not include every­one. This sim­ple instal­la­tion is a last-resort ges­ture at get­ting the atten­tion of the city, its policy-makers, and the pub­lic, in an effort to recon­tex­tu­al­ize and syn­the­size the nec­es­sary con­ver­sa­tion between the city and its citizens.

This project was installed at the AIA San Fran­cisco “Archi­tec­ture in the City” Fes­ti­val in 2008.

Design: Yes Duffy
Inspi­ra­tion: Chris Wein­man
Build: Yes Duffy, Julian Ful­ton, Patrick Sur­doval, Uriah Duffy