Suddenly, you are aware

An attempt to com­mu­ni­cate with rail com­muters in north­ern Chica­go, trans­form­ing their phones and tablets into imper­fect win­dows onto the phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of their commute.

Director’s statement

Being a pas­sen­ger on a train is the ulti­mate metaphor for a lack of per­son­al con­trol: the route was planned decades ago by a face­less plan­ning com­mit­tee, and even the accel­er­a­tion and brak­ing of the train is con­trolled by an invis­i­ble per­son. The urge to dis­so­ci­ate is strong, and tools like smart­phones are eager to help us do just that.

I present view­ers with an east­ward view from a north­bound Red Line train, con­fus­ing the space between their phys­i­cal state and the bod­i­less expe­ri­ence of engrossed device-usage. By direct­ing view­ers to reflect on their phys­i­cal bod­ies and the total auton­o­my they have over them, I hoped to give them a moment of self-aware­ness and inter­rupt that dis­so­cia­tive state.

In pre­vi­ous exper­i­ments with YouTube adver­tis­ing, I have played with the var­i­ous demo­graph­ic tar­get­ing tools avail­able. For this project, I want­ed to try and tar­get a spe­cif­ic class of per­son in a spe­cif­ic region…

A rush-hour com­muter on Chicago’s Red Line north of the Loop, seat­ed side­ways (the way most of the seats on the Red Line are ori­ent­ed), fac­ing win­dows that look out on Wrigleyville, Ander­son­ville, Rogers Park. In an attempt to neu­tral­ize the expe­ri­ence of their com­mute, they are watch­ing YouTube or play­ing an ad-sup­port­ed game on a phone or tablet.

YouTube pre­roll ads are skip­pable after five sec­onds, but the videos them­selves are not time-lim­it­ed. In this case, I opt­ed for a length of a lit­tle under four min­utes. In order to most­ly close­ly tar­get the audi­ence I hoped to reach, I lim­it­ed my scope to unmar­ried peo­ple in the low­er 70% of wage earn­ers. I weight­ed my place­ments to play pri­mar­i­ly dur­ing week­day rush hours. Google’s geo­graph­i­cal tar­get­ing isn’t quite as gran­u­lar as I would like, but I was able to lim­it the bound­aries of the ad so that it would only play in ZIP Codes that con­tain the north­ern leg of the Red Line.

I real­ly came up against the lim­i­ta­tions of Google Ads’ tar­get­ing tools with this project. If giv­en greater gran­u­lar­i­ty, I would have liked to tar­get view­ers with­in fifty feet of a Red Line track. With access to device accelerom­e­ter data, it would be pos­si­ble to only tar­get devices mov­ing faster than walk­ing speed, and could even pro­vide the oppor­tu­ni­ty to serve dif­fer­ent videos to north­bound and south­bound viewers.