Things You Should Know About Outdoor LED Billboards [trans_late]

 

All Images: West Leicester, February 2023

[Reconfigured Translation]:

An outdoor LED display (also known as billboard), is also a kind of sign. It provides a quick overview of the services and goods a place offers - thus providing an overview of market demand. Side hustle research = time reduced. Flashy or funny billboards may prevail in areas with high business competition, and the more flashy billboards are also a sign of the financial strength of the business. The ‘P’ in the LED screen indicates that the centre of the LED is the also adjacent to the two centres of the screen (N.B: pixel pitch is called ‘Pitch’). In addition, the temperature around the workplace can vary widely, and the wind can blow away dust bags.

When considering billboard placement, careful consideration should be given to GPS or RFID technology, traffic flow and pedestrian visibility. In the chain store system, billboards with similar specifications and standard text can also bring a sense of communication with customers. Not only must they consider saving costs, but also ignore product quality (which is likely to cause safety hazards). Fully immerse yourself in audience interaction and brand communication when a mobile device enters or leaves the vicinity of the board to trigger a response.

In short, billboards will bring huge commercial value, and the unique protective design can resist water and sunlight to a certain extent. The high technology and operating costs of large outdoor LED displays determine that they are more suitable for high-end advertising.  In addition, advertisers and agencies can get creative and avoid slogan blindness to create high-engagement campaigns. The greater the quality, the greater the field of view required when purchasing (and the greater the variability in ambient light). A term or noun is used to describe both commercial and non-commercial places.

What Are The Precautions For Installing An Outdoor LED Display?

Trismus:

The outdoor LED large screen needs to achieve the effect of wind and earthquake resistance, so a virtual geographic boundary around a board must be ensured during installation. Steel structure design should consider foundation, wind load, humidity, ambient temperature, lightning protection, environmental population density, a number of data points, and sensors with GPS, Wi-Fi and 4G. etc. Therefore, in the implementation process, the design drawings of the outdoor steel structure must be strictly reviewed by the relevant government departments to ensure rich and accurate placement options.

Water Proof:

Outdoor LED displays are installed outdoors, and it is necessary to ensure that they can work normally in all kinds of bad weather (such as rain and snow, moisture, video playback, etc.). Pay attention; too much moisture can cause a short circuit, or even a fire, which can lead to point-by-point correction technology. The image is clearer and the sense of hierarchy is stronger. Therefore, the partition walls, grilles, and the joint part of the screen body and the building, must be strictly waterproof and leak-proof. The screen body must be discharged smoothly in the event. It should be noted that the protection level of the outdoor LED display (front/back) is at least IP65, and cannot be lower than this protection level.

Dissipation:

The outdoor LED display must be equipped with a ventilation and cooling device to keep the indoor temperature of the display between -10°C and 40°C. Chips have different stability, brightness, and lifespan if the performance is not good. It may result in spending a lot of money but not getting good advertising results. From a marketing point of view, the flow of people may cause the integrated circuit to operate abnormally or burn out - making the LED display system unable to work normally. The use of diversified display modules makes the operation very convenient when working in a high temperature environment.

Lightning Protection:

The main models of LED display are: P1.875, P2.0, P2.5, P3, P4, P5, P6, P8, P10, P16, etc. In order to achieve good lightning protection performance, the LED lamp body and lampshade must have good grounding measures. The target audience likes public transport timetables, directions, flight arrivals, weather, football scores and much more. If the lightning protection is not done well, there are many cases where the outdoor LED display is damaged by lightning. Here's a little tip for you; outdoor LED large screens are mainly concentrated in the core. This allows for retargeted and personalised messages to be sent to the consumer.

The Age of Optimism (trans_late)

 

All Images: Cotteridge, Birmingham, November 2021

(Audio Transcript):

The Chancellor who is showing signs of breathing down his next-door neighbour's booster rhetoric promises us an academy for a new era of optimism it does not seem that if development is so anaemic it will feel non-existent for many countries after making many families feel pessimistic about their future living standards and issue that affects almost everyone that an issue that the Chancellor has said less and less UK in the installations charging for a mortgage in the hope that the Bank of England will soon start raising interest rates and heavy taxes rising inflation and borrowing costs are almost a recipe for combined income independent predictors expect that most people will experience little improvement to their living standards and some squeeze over the next five years.

Hope that these predictions will prove to be false because if they're right people will not experience The Age of Optimism when choosing the next like stagnant grinding age reuse this content.

John Lehr: 'The Island Position'

All Images: John Lehr: 'The Island Position', London, MACK, 2019

I recently came across these images, from a new photographic publication, entitled 'The Island Position' [1.], by American photographer, John Lehr, and was instantly drawn to them.  Anyone familiar with the kind of imagery that regularly crops up here, may find that relatively unsurprising - but I guess we all like what we like, when it comes down to it.

Certainly, shop fronts and retail windows, particularly of the smaller, more mundane variety, have appeared in my own photography, on numerous occasions.  Likewise, the integration of found texts into a visual image have long been part of my own practice - as has the focussed concentration on a specific location (or detail of).

I could even imagine having captured the image above on Leicester's Melton Road, where - I swear, I've observed essentially the same combination of neon signage, sky blue graphics and stacked packaging in at least one window, quite recently.

However, there is also something specifically American about these photos, I think.  This goes beyond the dollar signs and culturally specific references scattered amongst the signage - having as much to do with the even blast of intense sunlight illuminating each subject, and a kind of bland Modernism - typical of much (often low-rise) vernacular U.S. architecture.  These are the premises of a commercial culture which reached some kind of seeming apotheosis in the post-war Twentieth Century, as opposed to the Victorian era - as might be the case here in Britain.  They may recall the photography of Walker Evans or even the painting of Edward Hopper, from an earlier era - in terms of subject matter, but the real stylistic reference point would seem to be the Photorealist painters of the 1960s and 70s.

However, as an illuminating interview with Lehr, on www.americansuburbx.com reveals, these photos are more than simple formal exercises in a particular visual tradition.  Lehr claims to be monitoring, 

"an empire teetering back and forth over a line of regression and progress (as it has been if not morally, certainly economically) for nearly one hundred years." [2.], 

and also claims that, 

"what you see in the pictures are the outward displays of people participating in a system that will never deliver on its promises" [3.].  

In fact, what he is really documenting is a world in which money increasingly circulates through a virtual economy, rather than via physical outlets.  Even where the windows of those remaining premises might advertise themselves as portals to that online world, or stack up boxes of the very devices used to access it - they are destined to be forever behind its curve.  That would seem to be the particularly contemporary message behind the tawdry desperation really on display there.  Lehr may be part of a fairly venerable tradition - in terms of his chosen subject matter, but here - he feels like a distinctly twenty-first century outlier within it.  His is a status report from an American high street most likely to soon disappear altogether, in its accepted form.

Something else to strike a chord with me, is Lehr's assertion,

"I have nothing against a conceptual way of working, but what interests me as an artist is stumbling onto something through a process that is open to intuition and serendipity. I love the idea that I can begin my day as a photographer not knowing what I want to mean but through the process of photographing I can uncover something. It’s often the pictures themselves, not my ideas that drive things forward" [4.].

Despite my various forays into something a little more ideas-driven, in recent years, that still remains pretty much my own preferred starting point for most projects.



[1.]: John Lehr, 'The Island Position', London, MACK, 2019.

[2.], [3.] & [4.]: Brad Feuerhelm & John Lehr, 'John Lehr: The Island Position Interview',  www. american suburbx.com , March 2019.

Completed Paintings: 'Map 6' & 'Map 7'

As promised/threatened, here’s a more detailed look at my two most recent ‘Map’ paintings.  Apologies my tardiness in getting to this, - I feel like I’m playing catch-up here.

'Maps 6, 7 & 5', 'Mental Mapping' Exhibition, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum

Having completed the modestly proportioned ‘Maps 1 – 5’, I knew I wanted to extend the basic premise of the series into a larger format, in part - as a way of accommodating greater compositional complexity without everything becoming too fiddly.  I’ve worked with this 1 metre-square format a lot in recent years, and it always feels like a comfortable template with some relation to the human body.  In painting terms, it’s hardly large, but as a size point, It’s probably the place where ‘Medium’ gets properly interesting.  Anyway, ‘Map 6’ and ‘Map 7’ are the result, this time round.

The convolutions of how these two came together is somewhat anti-intuitive, and very much the consequence of consciously working towards an exhibition as a totality, over a more organic approach.  ‘Map 7’ was actually started before ‘5’ or ‘6’, and sat half-completed for several weeks while both they and my ‘Cement Cycle’ photographic project evolved.  ‘6’ then happened in about three weeks flat, (start to finish), whilst ‘7’ was eventually finished off in around five days, just prior to ‘Mental Mapping: New Work By Andrew Smith & Hugh Marwood’ being hung.  Once upon a time, pushing against a deadline like that would have caused me to cave, or lose faith in what I was doing, but I always felt it was a potentially strong piece, and never really doubted I could see it through.  Look how I’ve grown!

'Maps 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 & 7', 'Mental Mapping' Exhibition, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum

Much of what has already been written about the technical approach and general intent of previous ‘Maps’ carries over here.  Both pieces share a source location in Leicester, with ‘1’ and ‘2’, and, as before, the poster fragments that constitute much of their substance, were picked up beneath, or found hanging from, the large advertising hoardings located on that junction.  For these two though, Google Maps, rather than A-Z street maps provided the relevant cartographical content.  At the risk of excessive nerdery, I'm interested in the differing conventions and levels of detail between disparate maps of the same locations.  In this case, it can be detected in the radiused terminals of certain streets, and the use of blue or grey shading to designate water or different types of thoroughfare.

‘Map 6’

'Map 6', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2015

‘Map 6’ started out with a largely grey palette in its early stages, and featured a large fragment of advertising for East Midlands Trains, which has long since vanished beneath subsequent layers.  Sometimes, the parts of a painting you grow most attached to early on must be destroyed before it can really move on, as was the case there.  What really struck me about the source location this time was the visual impact of the numerous vivid yellow and blue traffic direction signs peppered across it.  Even under grey Midland skies these sing out, and in bright sunlight - they positively fizz with synthetic primary colour.  References to them duly found their way into the painting, and it became something else altogether.

West Leicester, May 2015

Textually, there are actually three key phrases at work in ‘6’, although the repeated occurrences of the word ‘Wait’ are effectively lost under subsequent statements.  I enjoy the presence of earlier lost messages within these paintings that, ultimately, only I know about.  For what it’s worth, ‘Wait’ relates to the illuminated instructions of the junction’s numerous pedestrian crossings.  What finally took precedence were the two advertising slogans, ‘Good Stuff Happens’ and ‘Regret Nothing’, - relating to oven chips and fizzy drinks, respectively.  I’m amused by the trite, vaguely self-help tone of such commercial guff, and the way it attempts to equates implied ‘quality of life’ with the instant gratification of low-grade foodstuffs.  That being said, on a philosophical level - who can say that, if one waits and avoids the pitfalls of excessive regret, - good stuff can’t actually happen at any stage of life?  If I'm honest, it does feel like I'm involved in something of a creative late flowering myself.

Advertising Messages, West Leicester, May 2015

It also occurs to me that a few years ago, not long after the installation of a British, Tory-led coalition government, I produced another painting with an unfeasibly tangled composition and a primary palette of red, yellow and blue.  We have another new, unfettered Tory administration now, - installed even as ‘Map 6’ was being painted, and free to do its worst.  Could it be that ‘Good Stuff Happens’ is sardonically ironic after all?  Is it any real coincidence that the direction arrows point down as well as left, or that they are subsumed in roundels of deep blue?  Am I trying to stretch a point much too far? (Probably).

'Asylum 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

I don’t know if ‘Map 6’ is wholly successful, or necessarily the strongest of the ‘Map’ series, but I’m happy enough to stand by it.  It’s probably trying to do far too much at once, but I do like the way it almost painted itself, and now seems locked in perpetual internal debate.

‘Map 7’

'Map 7', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2015

‘Map 7’ is a little more straightforward in both composition and phraseology, and was always envisaged as a rather rainbow-coloured affair.  Its somewhat bald, ‘End Of Life’ statement was lifted straight out of the signage for an End Of Life Centre, attached to railings on the same junction as above.  That’s a strangely euphemistic title for a car-wrecking yard, by the way, - being the same enterprise which shelters behind the graffiti-adorned gates I’ve revisited several times on here.

West Leicester,  January 2015

The palette of each of the ‘Maps’ has generally been derived from the various corporate ldentities, or other functional colour schemes found at their source sites.  This is no exception, and the starbursts and sugary, hot pink/peppermint green/lemon yellow/royal blue combo used to advertise what is otherwise a pretty grungy and grease-stained set-up, delights me no end.  In fact, the vaguely Po-Mo, Memphis-style palette brings to my mind an earlier period (in the early 1980s), when Britain also lurched dangerously to the political Right and market forces ran riot.  I write this in a week when the project to fully privatise the Post Office, and to further starve the NHS and dismantle the Welfare mechanisms that support countless disadvantaged citizens, were announced [1.].  We are sold a vision of Britain in which the Government’s ideologically driven misdeeds are cloaked with the bland notion of ‘Aspiration’.  Sadly, aspiration isn’t an option for many, for some of whom the continuing fixation with austerity, in maintenance of an economic system that favours only the wealthy, may literally imply the ‘End Of Life’.

On a more parochial level, the Redevelopment of Leicester’s St Augustine’s district, extending to the west, continues in earnest.  I’ve written aboutthis recently too, but had no idea just what a monster of a building was being planned to house De Montfort University’s ever-expanding student intake, when I photographed it a few weeks back [2.].  The old burnt-out Friar’s Mill  has a roof once more and, though it had largely passed me by, it seems that extensive plans to redevelop the whole area have been under public consultation for some time.  That includes several locations from our ‘Orfeo’ film, and the site of the cement depot from my ‘Cement Cycle’ project, (both also part of ‘Mental Mapping’).  The city shrugs its shoulders and, one of my favourite entropic playgrounds may be reaching the end of its life as a hotspot of picturesque dilapidation.

Student Accommodation Block Under Construction, St Augustines, West Leicester, June 2015

I can spoon-feed you all this stuff, till the cows come home, but it only really skims the surface of my thoughts and feelings both in the source locations, and whilst working on each piece.  I’d also hope that the found texts running through each of the ‘Maps’ are sufficiently ambiguous or open-ended to allow the viewer to apply their own potential interpretations.  It may be that, even without my cod philosophising, the juxtaposition of a terminal ‘E.o.L’ message and ‘7’s cheery, polychromatic presentation is a sufficiently entertaining conundrum, even as it stands.

That brings us up to date with the ‘Map’ series.  When I embarked on them, eight months ago, I hoped there might be up to eight to draw on for the exhibition.  In the event, seven were completed in that time, along with ‘Orfeo’, and ‘Cement Cycle’, - which actually feels like pretty good going by my standards.  They all made the cut, and fitted the space available in Rugby rather well.  Each has its relative strengths and weaknesses, (and I certainly have my favorites), but I’m reasonably satisfied with them as a body, and I don’t feel like there are any complete duds.

Will there be any more ‘Maps’? – I’m really not sure.  ‘Mental Mapping’ obviously felt like a major milestone, but part of me would still like to do the eighth ‘Map’, even after the event, (and there is an idea in the tank).  However, there are a variety of things to take stock of in the coming months, both artistically and otherwise, and it’s possible my next significant burst of creative activity may involve something other than painting for a while.  Either way, I should have more time for blogging over the second half of 2015.  

[1.]:  Even more cynical, is Chancellor George Osborne’s move to tie all future governments into the harsh imperatives of their chosen world view.  (There they go with their flippin’ ‘Capitalist Realism’ again).

[2.]:  Each afternoon, when I return home from work, this edifice appears to have acquired another story.  It seems set to dominate our entire neighbourhood, much as does the student tower, a little to the east, which I wrote about a while back.