Invisible Guest Books

Any physical location has stories to tell.

Every place consists not only of its immediate physical characteristics, but also, in a sense, of the events that have helped mold it. No matter where we go, something has already happened there, someone has been there before, someone has experienced something there before. These events make a place what it is before we get there, and our actions in that place shape it for its next set of visitors. Our bodies and brains, only capable of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and moving through space, fail to capture the depth of information embedded in our surroundings.

How can we begin to unveil the rich layers of history, events, and experiences that we are blind to, but exist everywhere we go?

Ian Frazier's essay Bumpin'n shows how a device as simple as a guest book can begin to capture the layer of human experience embedded in a place. While the guest book does not represent the entirety of events and ideas that belong to a place, it begins to show us how rich this type of information can get.

Geo-tagging is a technology that, much like a guest book, helps capture content that is associated with a physical place. By adding geographic information like latitude and longitude to a photograph or blog post, electronic content be tied to a dot on the map instead of just floating in cyber-space.

While geo-tagging may be gaining popularity thanks in part to the growing amount of consumer electronics devices with built in global positioning chips, it has not always been the status-quo. An older method of leaving an electronic trail in a physical location that I am quite fond of is called the Yellow Arrow system.
Yellow Arrow: Location: 44th Street @ 7th Avenue, Manhattan, NY (US) TXT: Stand facing this arrow and you'll hear the best urban symphony of your life.
YellowArrow.net reads: "Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a 'deep map' that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces." Let's say you want to leave a comment in a specific place for the other people who come to that place to see. All you need is a Yellow Arrow sticker and a mobile phone. You stick the Arrow on what you want to comment on, and then you write your comment in a text massage on your phone, and send it to the Yellow Arrow number. The Yellow Arrow sticker has a unique ID number and a phone number that passers-by can send a text message to when they want to read that Arrow's content. Your content is then text messaged to whoever passes your sticker and wants to know what you wrote.

As a cross between a guest book and a geo-tag, the Yellow Arrow system is useful, fun, and implements technology in an interesting way that makes us consider the layers and layers of personal experience that exist in a place before we get there.