Signs of Life 01

A neighborhood rarely submits to examination on its own accord, but it produces signs of life just the same: small visual blips appearing on surfaces that may have had other plans for themselves.

A word inflated to the size of a personal public announcement; a face reduced to a few uncertain sensory organs, like an improvised diagnostic chart; a sad figure cradling an impersonal sphere like a surrogate for a kindred spirit, while footprints gather around as small bits of time. While, given time, this will amount to an official medical history, these signs do confirm continued urban activity just the same.

Public walls record not lives themselves, but some sort of projected leakage: declarations, compulsions, jokes, affections, territorial impulses, and small outbreaks of form. They are subtle and quite diverse readings: irregular, noisy, impossible to standardize, yet sufficient to reassure us that there’s still a living patient somewhere out there.