I found this wheat-pasted poster on a metal electrical pole in Greenwood next to an apartment building with ground-level vanancies and a tent encampment blocking a sidewalk. Commercial mixed-use real estate promised activation, foot traffic, business, and convenience.
The shopping district is a lacuna.
The black-and-white image reads HEART MONITOR. The decaying building and glitch esthetic look totalitarian. There is no information, link, or QR code to direct the passing viewer.
The poster is on SDOT metal. It has a short shelf life. There is a war for real estate on poles - the ruins of rusted staples and ripped paper corners preserved with packing tape.
I looked up the name on Spotify. There is a song called “Metaphor”. The copyright for the music says “2022 harvardbookclub.”
I google “harvardbookclub,” and find a website with the same name. The website features a creative named Yung Durr from Koreatown, Los Angeles. The marketing is urban, DIY with slick web design.
Yung Durr also has YouTube and SoundCloud channels featuring many videos and music projects with minimal clicks, sometimes in the single digits.
The democratization of creative tools and the hegemony of the algorithmic mob feed an abusive cycle of digital self-worth, hate, and violence. Today, the violence is present but quiet. The streets offer respite from the internet.
Finding this artist first in the physical world (flyer on a telephone pole) and then digitally (Spotify, Youtube) is called “phygital convergence” -the tactile and digital worlds intersecting in a hybrid reality.
Young saplings dead outside new townhouses. Wooden tree stakes support brittle limbs like stockades