PED X-ING
SL: A joint column! About all kinds of signs! They said it couldn’t be done, yet here it is. You may be wondering about the origins of this column, and I am here to say wonder no longer.
This column came about after I had procrastinated writing my originally proposed column (which would have been entitled A is for Artificial Intelligence Scares Me) for so long that Mingjia, out of frame’s EIC, checked in on me via email. It was at this point that I decided not only does AI scare me, but it also does not stimulate me creatively. What I realized does stimulate my creativity is signs.
MC: … and I love signs! They are so ubiquitous in our lives and we are trained to always pay attention to them. We do pay attention, but only to the information conveyed by them and rarely their actual presence as shiny aluminum boards coated with high-reflectivity rubber surfaces. They are specific enough to be generic and yet generic enough for something that is always situated. Over the summer I started to take photos of signs and save them on Dropbox. Happily floating in suburban neighborhoods, tourist hotspots, institutions, alongside highways…. they are so weird!
SL: So without further ado, here is our first edition of the joint column: signage. And we are here to answer the question of age:
MC: Can the pedestrian sign figures walk around?
Perhaps another prerequisite question needs to be asked. What is the name of the little figure illustrated in the pedestrian signs? I googled and there is no exact answer. I thought that the nomenclature of the road signs is a good place to start. The all-powerful (and for obvious reasons, often dismissed by professors) Wikipedia gives the technical name of the sign - “pedestrian crossing.” Straightforward at first sight. In the U.S. (we love acronyms!), it is usually printed in shorthand as PED X-ING.
PED, Ped. That is a good name. Our silent walking figure calls itself Ped. Ped is frozen in an aluminum frame and imprinted on the highly reflective adhesive plastic coating. Its expressive figure gestures to the actual pedestrians that they may cross the road in the presence of law. It also reminds drivers that like moose and bears, humans pop into their home turf from time to time.
So Ped is a pedestrian crossing sign.
all of the following information comes completely from this one graphic that I really hope is accurate: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ql4jh1/pedestrian_crossing_signs_in_europe/
MC: Let us return to the term pedestrian crossing for a moment. The temporal ambiguity that such words imply perfectly describes the predicament that Ped finds itself in. Are pedestrians crossing here and now? Or does the sign define its jurisdiction as a crossing between cars and humans? Just as Ped is frozen in the movement of walking and fixed in location permanently, the site of pedestrian crossing is at once defined by its mode of encounter (cross) and its encounter actions. (crossing)
Ped does its job diligently. It never walked away from its post until it had made a friend for itself. In one moist and cold morning in the early spring, another pedestrian crossing sign is installed across the road by the municipal engineering department. “Hey there - “ the newcomer pedestrian figure yelled at Ped, “fancy a walk around the block? I’m new to this area.” “Walk? But I am walking!” Ped mentally shrugs its shoulders. “You are walking alright, but have you ever walked around? My name is Xing, by the way.”
They have not spoken since then. Sitting at a new-urbanist model suburb for the most of its life, Ped had rarely communicated with the signs around him. They are rather dull to speak with, thought Ped. The flashing yellow bus sign never sees an actual person waiting for the bus. The stop sign yells “halt” (do you know that in France, the stop signs say STOP, while in Quebec, they say ARRET?) yet barely do motorists tune their frequencies in line with the red, flat metal marble piece. If we had to impose and personify the signage at Ped’s intersection, the bus sign would probably awkward the crowd with its dad jokes, while the stop sign would make a lot of friends through its sliminess. Ped would have spoken to them more often, but he is the wallflower type.
MC: Nonetheless, the voice of his new colleague echoes more intensely as they stand their way into the moist season. Walk around? Right, walk - that is what I am doing and have been doing here. Around - round? Like a roundabout? (do you know that they are called rotaries only in Massachusetts?) Walk’ round? Walk circles?
An influx of ever-expanding thoughts flushes through Ped’s 10mm hex-nuts and washers into the aluminum back panel and almost burns through the local skate club sticker attached to the panel. The multi-threaded thoughts confuse Ped like cross-merging at an eight-lane freeway. Ped’s steel-stud body almost shivers. Ped has a revelation - what do cars do in a roundabout? They draw circles. Can I put myself in the position of a car? Is that what Xing means by “walking around?” The point is not that I am walking, but that I am drawing a circle through walking.
MC: In the world of the signs, the concept of friction does not exist. Therefore, Ped could not have figured out that walking was about the reciprocal relation between the feet and the surface they tread upon. Ped could not understand walking as a means of travel. Why would a road sign want to travel? Ped was born into walking permanently to inform its audiences and to indicate a crossing. The division of labor in the world of signs serves and only understands abstracted indications, universalized localities and deterritorialized names of historical celebrities.
So Ped could only think that the cars are indicating some form of information by drawing circles with their figures. Ped does not know what information exactly are the cars trying to imply with their circular movement. Maybe if Ped could reply by repeating the exact “message,” it would draw the cars’ attention. Mininicing the cars’ moving dynamics, Ped starts to wiggle its figure left and right while trying to maintain the walking movement at the same time. An anonymous pulling force draws Ped’s figure to the left boundary of the pedestrian sign it inhabits.
MC: Ped has been constantly moving, but has never experienced displacement. Turns out, human physics transgresses the world of signs effortlessly. As Ped wiggles and starts to move, its figure suddenly acquires (unthinkable!) abstractions such as a center of gravity, a friction coefficient and a bodily mass! Ped falls out the sign frame as it loses balance, and smashes itself against the lukewarm winter sun-kissed asphalt.
A metamorphosis. Ped finds itself on the ground again inanimate. But its view has changed - a large portion is the sky, with gutters rising next to it. The cars got much bigger, and their shapes more skewed. Ped still finds them peculiar. Ped also finds itself still in the permanent movement of walking. It feels a subtle sense of achievement, though. Something seems different - Ped feels people walking over it, rubbing their shoes against Ped.
Ped becomes a pedestrian marking on the road.
