Noticing the disappearance of notice
It is peculiar to be so sure of something's existence, so absolute in the knowledge that they not only are here but that you can close your eyes and picture their placement, only to find that they are not. I am talking about something that exists to be noticed, or at least to facilitate the act of noticing. Something that most of us will have walked past countless times in our life. Something we all became so accustomed to noticing that we stopped noticing them. The humble notice board has been removed from our lives so silently that we never even stopped to notice. Did you notice this?
This is a defence of the notice board, a physical manifestation of community, of pausing, of a reluctance to rush.
In a recent act of attempted Guerilla Marketing, we went out searching for notice boards to pin our marketing posters. After first stopping at a small supermarket we confidently strolled to the entrance to find the notice board that had forever and shall forever, we assumed, be there. You know the one that carries a widely disparate array of notices. A piano teacher, a removal van, a lost cat, or a flea market coming to town.
One could assume that notice boards are yet another casualty of the digital age, the analogue nature of pin-in-paper-in-board falling to the wayside with the convenience of a social media post that can reach a wider audience and include more information. In fact, as we drove with increasing desperation in the search for a notice board we questioned why we didn't invest the same time in building our social networks. We had, after all, spent hours perfecting the digital poster and posting online would have taken us seconds. Perhaps, instead of sitting in a depressed Burger King on the outskirts of town with a stack of vagabond posters with nowhere to go, we’d be sat in our studio watching the likes and digital engagement rolling in and feeling the serotonin rushing our brains.
We want to return to the time of pins, magnets and tape. Where things are not permanent, and the collective action of choreographic arrangement means that your poster may be removed or covered tomorrow. Why does the information for a local book fair here in Southern Sweden need to be held for eternity in a server in Luleå 1400 km away? It doesn’t. We want to see the return of the notice board to public spaces, and most importantly, we want no one to notice.
