Every picture tells a story - or is designed to

WGBH's wordless wall challenges programmers as well as Pike drivers

Christopher Pullman, a WGBH vice president, is curator of the station's digital mural. (Globe Photo / Josh Reynolds)

BRIGHTON - Maybe it stands to reason that a 30-foot-tall photo of Dick Cheney, towering over the Massachusetts Turnpike here, would raise some hackles among the Boston commuting crowd. That's what happened one day in October, not long after WGBH's digital mural went live.

The photo referred to a "Front- line" documentary about the vice president's powerful tenure in government, and showed photos of Cheney with various presidents: Nixon, Ford, both Bushes. But because the screen is allowed to display only photos -no words, no reference to a TV show itself -some drivers contacted the station to grumble about what they saw. The same thing happened when the mural featured a photo of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"People made the mistake of assuming that this was an endorsement, rather than an invitation to discuss," said Christopher Pullman, WGBH's vice president for branding and visual communications, and the chief curator of the station's prominent new display.

Such have been the challenges of programming the 30-by-45-foot digital screen on WGBH's $85 million new headquarters. Station leaders wanted their building to reflect the goings-on inside, and settled quickly on the notion of a digital display. But when discussions with the Boston Redevelopment Authority began three years ago, the "knee-jerk reaction was, 'No, no, no, not another Times Square, please,' " said Prataap Patrose, deputy director for urban design at the BRA.

The technology is the same, after all: the massive LED screen (for "light-emitting diode") is made of a series of pixels composed of five lamps, each the size of a grain of rice. But unlike the Times Square screens, WGBH's mural is part of the building's architecture, built directly into the exterior wall. And instead of flashing in a pedestrian area, it hangs beside a major highway.

The BRA wasn't concerned about road safety, Patrose said: The screen is visible for a mile, "so you have a fair amount of time to process it in your brain, even if you're driving at 50 miles an hour." But because this was Boston's first major LED display, "we needed to, in our minds, use this as a test case," he said. "We wanted to play it safe because we weren't clear if this is something we wanted to see up and down the Pike."

In order to win BRA approval, WGBH agreed to a complex set of restrictions. The images have to be static or slow-moving. They can't allude to sponsorships or promote specific shows. In fact, they can't contain explanatory words at all, save for the station's call letters during two periods of heavy eastbound traffic on the Pike, from 6:30 to 9 a.m and 4:30 to 6 p.m.

For station planners, that wordlessness has been the biggest challenge. Pullman sometimes laments the fact that he can't add an "Actual size" punch line to a photo of a whale, or put historical images in context.

"You can't possibly tell the whole story line," Pullman said. "And so how much of the story is enough?"

In more than three months of operation, station producers have been steadily experimenting. For each day, they find photographs tied to a WGBH show or a community event. Designer Tim Jacques then formats the pictures for the large rectangular screen, and for vertical slivers along the building that light up, as well. (He uses two computer monitors attached together, which make for a long horizontal line.)

Nature photographs tend to showcase well, Pullman said. References to public affairs can be daunting. Reacting quickly to news can be tough: On the mornings after the Red Sox won the ALCS and World Series, Jacques, 22, arrived at work at 4:45 a.m. to get baseball photos onto the mural by 6:30.

And without context or explanation, producers have found, the images can be confounding - even to literate Boston types. Last month, to reference a "Nova" documentary about the debate over evolution and intelligent design, the station displayed a photo of Michelangelo's "Creation of Man" panel from the Sistine Chapel, alternating with an image of a bearded Charles Darwin.

That day, Pullman said, one of his colleagues called a taxi and the driver looked up, perplexed. "Who was that guy up there?" he asked. "Was it George Bernard Shaw?"

The answer was on the station's website, which contains a daily explanation of the image and the show it reflects. Because of that reference point, Pullman said, "we're gradually relaxing on the question of how do you make it crystal-clear what you're talking about."

Still, station officials sometimes wonder if people know where to find the information, or realize who produces the mural itself. Pullman says some people have written to sneaker manufacturer New Balance - whose logo appears on the building behind WGBH - to find out what's on the screen.

Once drivers are conditioned to check the station's website, Patrose said, the vagueness should pay dividends. "I think it's a very contemporary digital-age approach to both building design and promotion," he said.

Not every passerby has been as pleased. Jeff Cutler, a Hingham resident who drives by the mural on occasion, said he can't remember a specific image he's seen - and he doesn't like the idea of a massive light show over the road.

"Philosophically, I'm against giving drivers too much to worry about when they're driving and an electronic board with regularly changing images and messages falls right into that category," Cutler wrote by e-mail.

But compared to the loud billboards that surround it, Patrose said, he finds the mural can actually be calming. When he drove past a photo of Niagara Falls the other day, he said, it felt like "a momentary Zen experience in the city."

"It is slowing down actual reality, so to speak, to allow you to process it at a speed that you can relate to and digest and make meaning out of," Patrose said. "Which I would say, in laymen's terms, is what Zen is about."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.