Matas Buckus

With our ever-increasing reliance on digital ways of navigating, and on virtual communication more broadly, public signage subsists in the urban public space as an ornament, as vibrant metal artifacts that grab your attention, but do not always provide the information you need.  

The fact that these signs are available on the open depository Wikimedia Commons, suggests that they should be used by anyone, reproduced, re-interpreted and played with. Features such as scale and colour are indexed by the designer, making the subtle formal disparities between signage from different parts of the world visible. The designer stays between the design and production process, surrounding the five relative posters with housing for excess material.  

Common ground presents scraped public domain visual data, stripped of their communicative content, produced and displayed with an eye on industrial, public and logistic material and typographic norms. The project speculates what could happen to these public artifacts once they are deprived of commands, and physically handled by human hands. Fragmenting and arranging, governing the languages of attention that govern us, in search for new meaning.