What isn’t shown in this photo is how the cabling that rises from the mess of wires continues two floors up and then hangs over, onto the roof, like a massive wet ponytail on the shoulder of an early morning commuter. Or how the cable on the left continues astride the building’s exterior like an errant thought. Or how the whole batch is in plain view alongside an unguarded, 24-hour parking lot. This is the not uncharacteristic communication hub for a small mixed-use building of apartments and businesses. It fails as grammar, as design, as security, as instruction, as map, as anything other than its core functionality. Despite all those shortcomings, all of them secondary to the cause at hand, through the hub flows sound and image and code, signals for humans and machines to receive and respond to. What are the primary functions of those signals? How much do their secondary traits fail, and do those failures impede the intended communication?
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.