Yellow Arrow is a public art project that was active from 2004-2006 and was created by Christopher Allen, Brian House, and Jesse Shapins, collectively known as Counts Media. The project is an important example of locative media and mobile phone art and draws concepts from psychogeography.
Yellow Arrow stickers are obtained from the project website and placed anywhere in the public realm. When encountering a sticker on the street, one can send the unique code printed on it as a text message to the project phone number. Moments later a message will be received that was left by the person who placed the sticker.
The Yellow Arrow symbol means "there’s more here: a hidden detail, a funny story, a memory, and a crazy experience." Each arrow links digital content to a specific location using the mobile phone.
As an underground phenomenon, the project developed an international community, and 7535 Yellow Arrow stickers were placed in 467 cities and 35 countries. Since first appearing at the Psy-Geo-Conflux in New York in May 2004, Yellow Arrow has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN and NBC, the London Times, Politiken, Liberation, Diari de Barcelona, and de Volkskrant. Yellow Arrow was also featured in Lonely Planet's Guide to Experimental Travel.
In Toward the Sentient City, Mark Shepard writes, "In place of the ubiquitous bronze plaque providing "official narratives" affixed to the side of "significant" urban structures or spaces, Yellow Arrow provides for the unofficial annotation of everyday urban places by ordinary citizens."
Yellow Arrow was included in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2008.
In 2006, the project was discontinued and its content was archived on Flickr.
Famous quotes containing the words yellow and/or arrow:
“But we are spirits of another sort.
I with the morning’s love have oft made sport,
And like a forester the groves may tread
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessèd beams,
Turns unto yellow gold his salt green streams.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Anton Petrovich turned into the passage, followed the arrow to men, mankind, human beings, marched past the toilet, past the kitchen, gave a start when a cat darted under his feet, quickened his step, reached the end of the passage, pushed open a door, and a shower of sunlight splashed his face.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)