Twitter Account of the Week: Discover the Accidental Poetry of Metro Stations with @BART_ebooks
Probably everyone has had a moment of glimpsing some jarring bit of text on digital signs in airports or city retail districts — possibly even pausing long enough to see what words will come next that might make a highly weird phrase make sense.
A new Twitter account called @BART_ebooks has a lot of fun with this idea, by documenting examples of those jarring mini-texts that have appeared in mass-transit stations.
The name refers to Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART — the metro system that serves San Francisco and surrounding areas — and to a Twitter convention: A Twitter handle ending in “ebooks” often signals an account that is basically a bot spewing random text from some database of words.
That’s obviously not what digital transit-station signage really does. But viewed through this account, it sure looks like that’s what’s going on.
The upshot is that these quick snaps of isolated phrases from scrolling-text digital signage are accidentally poetic.
Or might even remind one of the landmark work of artist Jenny Holzer, who used LED signs as a medium for evocative messages that were striking in part because they were communicated in a typically cold and official format.
Suddenly an isolated word or three feels like … a short-story prompt?
Subconscious thoughts about fellow passengers?
Proposed existential journeys?
Or, perhaps, nothing poetic at all — just the blunt summation of a typical mass-transit traveler’s id:
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