Sorry, this space is taken
By Christopher Shea
The Cambridge-based artist Peggy Nelson has come up with a new "urban intervention" that plays off the Boston tradition of saving parking spaces after snowstorms, and she invites her fellow citizens to join in on Flickr. While Southie residents are famous for using anything at hand to reserve the spots they've shoveled (or even haven't shoveled), Nelson's Cones Project focuses on that icon of space-saving: the orange traffic cone.
By law, all space-savers must be removed from the street 48 hours after a snow emergency ends. On Flickr, Nelson has posted shots of a traffic cone "illegally" reserving all sorts of physical spaces. These include: a bar stool, a seat on the subway, a spot in Harvard Stadium, a cushion on a living-room couch, and -- useful, indeed -- a ladies'-room stall. At this writing there were 14 photographs, mostly in the Cambridge area.
Home base for the venture is theconesproject.com, but that page just directs you to a Flickr map showing where the unconventional space-savings have taken place so far. To see the photos posted so far, visit this Flickr page.
To join the intervention, take your own cone photo, upload it to Flickr, and add the tag "conesproject" (one word). Then watch to see just how viral this space-saving campaign gets.
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Hahahahaha.
Awesome.
What is the point here???
genius.
All I have to say about these pics is OmG!!!! They are all just to die for. I fell in love with the idea the moment I read about it and and yes the pictures lived up to all the hype. Any who, congrats to the fabulous artist and KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!!!!!!!! :)
Lame
Where can I buy one?
Do they come with stick on faces like a potato head?
;-)
I think these would work better if the cones were placed in crowded places. After all, the point of saving spaces is that the spaces are in short supply. A cone on a stool in an empty bar sort of misses that point. Good concept, not sure execution is quite there - at least not in the few samples here. I think a cone on a crowded train and a cone in a crowded bar would work better.
Reminds me of the time I went to a girls' hockey game at Noble and Greenough. The game was packed and I was standing at the end of the ice and I had to go to the ladies' room. Not wanting to lose my spot and not feeling that I could disregard the call of nature, I pulled a trash barrel from its corner and placed it where I was standing. After a couple of inquisitive stares, I explained, "I'm from Southie and I'm saving my spot." All in good fun, of course ... but my space was saved when I got back.
Putting the cones in an empty bar just makes her point further; even though the parallel would be clearer if she 'saved' the space in a packed bar. It leads the viewer to wonder 'why bother saving a space in an empty bar,' and forces the viewer to internalize the answer; *because saving a space in a packed bar is rude.*
eh....good idea...so so execution.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.
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