EXETER A-Z was one of a thousand pieces of work commissioned by England's Regional Arts Boards for the 'Year of the Artist' in 2000. The scheme funded artists to make work in unsual locations, and I conceived this work as a week of public interventions aboard Exeter's bus fleet.
The sites for the work were the scrolling LED text signs designed for commercial advertising space. There were four stages to the project:
• identifying eight of the city centre's bus routes (labelled from 'A' to 'Z'), ensuring as broad a spread across the city as possible;
• collecting text from the public domain by means of a series of reconnaissance trips along the chosen routes. Material particular to each route was drawn from: anecdotal evidence mined from members of the community (interviews with/overheard phrases spoken by people who live/work/travel on route), found text (for example, public signs or discarded notes), site-related observations and personal memories;
• distilling the collected material, composing eight short sequences of text (one for each of the selected bus routes);
• displaying each of the eight text sequences, running in a loop amid commercial advertisements, on its appropriate route. Each sequence was premised by the phrase EXETER A-Z, which acted as an identifier for the project.
Anybody travelling on one or more of the selected routes during the period of public display became a potential audience for the work. EXETER A-Z aimed to:
• arouse curiosity amongst bus passengers;
• cause these passengers to look again at the over-familiar sites along their journeys, by framing the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way;
• redress, in a small way, the overabundance of impersonal signage which pervades the world.
Below are example texts from three of the eight chosen bus routes.
Images: Stephen Hodge.
F Route
N Route
R Route