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When Signs Look Back: How Interactive Signs Will Shape Toronto Streets
The landscape of a city is formed primarily by what you can see. In many ways, it is in the obvious things: the aesthetic of the buildings, the colours of signage, the brands that pulse and blink on lit billboards lining the highway. Less obvious elements factor in, too, however — the haphazard organization of things in space that accrete over time.

Perhaps this is what accounts for the way in which cities — in the abstract, only mere arrangements of space and objects — can be said to have their own characters. It is what we call the psycho-geographic terrain of a place, and where those two sometimes disparate terms meet is precisely where the physical meets the mental — where cities both impinge upon the mind and also imprint upon them, too.

If that’s the case, however, what happens when the city and its various elements start to look back?

While one can hardly call urban space “passive,” there is a sense that when it comes to the streetscape and signage of a city, we are the ones doing the looking. But a set of emerging technologies, now increasingly familiar to anyone who has a smartphone, is redefining the dynamic between the signs that make up the horizon of a city and who is in fact looking at whom.

The idea isn’t new. In 2013, French fashion company La Redoute debuted its version of what has since been dubbed weather-triggered advertising. Billboards in Paris would display winter wear when the temperatures were low and summer outfits when things began to heat up.

There is appeal to the idea. The signs of spring in the city are often somehow connected to commerce: patios overflowing with patrons, ice cream trucks playing their tunes as they slip down city streets. The concept of ads that respond to the time of year would appear to be part of the way in which we mark the progression of the seasons through the changes in the streetscape — a phenomenon particularly acute in northern cities like Toronto which can at times feel like a different place entirely in July than it does January.

That sort of responsiveness and focus on ambience is at least part of what Cadillac Fairview, the property company most known for its malls, is hoping to achieve as it shifts its signage to being fully digital.

Sebastian Greenhill is the senior vice-president of architecture and design at the company.

“We are hoping to create what we’ve been calling atmospheric imagery or lifestyle imagery,” says Greenhill, suggesting that in the future, screens lining various properties might serve as both advertising but also just atmosphere.

“It’s still a business proposition that actually makes money, “ he says, “but the nice thing about it is that sometimes the screen can be gently blowing cornfields or clouds in the sky.”

Part of the idea here is, of course, to make malls more enticing places to be, which may or may not be to a city’s benefit. But another aspect of interactive signage is that presents another space for public representation.

Kelly Smith is the senior manager of digital networks at Cadillac Fairview, which means she essentially heads up the equivalent of an R&D lab. Where she sees potential in digital signage is in its capacity for placemaking.

The idea is that signage, often passively a part of streetscape or the ambience of a place, is more actively a part of the spaces through which people move.

“So it's not just advertising,” she says, “it's also just making your environment something and being able to, say, change that and react to the seasons.”

Smith also points to the large electronic billboard at Yonge and Dundas square in Toronto, which is the largest in the country.

“Artists, musicians, small filmmakers will buy time on that screen — not a lot, just the bare minimum that they can afford,” she says. “And they will find out when their ads are gonna run and they will get a photo of themselves standing in front of that screen and use that to then post on social and promote themselves.”

Whether or not that billboard is “public space” is of course a question worth asking. But it does point to the way in which the malleability and adaptability of digital signage provides different avenues for how places are made. After all, a print billboard can either be an ad for perfume, or a poster about Black Lives Matter; a digital can be both, which at the very least expands the possibilities for the psycho-geographic terrain of a place.

Yet, it’s worth pointing out that if the term psychogeography is about the relation of place and mind, there are also effects when we become aware that signage is not just interactive or digital, but also looks back.

In 2015, South African agency Lew’LaraTBWA worked with coffee brand Cafe Pele to make what it called a “contagious billboard.” A video screen with a camera would track passersby and then, when a critical mass had gathered, it would trigger a clip of a man yawning. It would then display text asking “did you just yawn” — as many people do when others yawn — and then, like magic, Cafe Pele representatives would appear with trays of espresso.

It is a devilishly clever bit of marketing, but it also highlights the link between the surveilling an audience and then responding to them. This, after all, was meant to be the grand promise of digital advertising — whether or not it in fact played out that way. In being able to observe people or track them, you are able to target ads to their specific behaviours or wants, bypassing the scattershot nature of more traditional advertising for something more specific. It is why, for example, Facebook and Google now control 90% of the online advertising business.

But that mode of surveillance which tracks consumer behaviour is already widespread in physical applications. Foursquare initially started life as one of a plethora of Web 2.0 companies centred upon the then-ubiquitous buzzword “social.” Its gimmick was that you would use the app to “check in” to places you visit to both keep a record and connect with friends. But when that sort of “life logging” fell out fashion as Facebook and Instagram took over, Foursquare found they nonetheless had a trove of data about where people went, when, and how often in order to spend money.

Now Foursquare partners with data brokers and marketers to track where people are spending their time and cash, cross-referencing snippets about people to get ever-more specific recommendations.

Such tracking — or what might euphemistically be called reactivity — is at least the idea behind another concept, this from M&C Saatchi in London. In 2015, a billboard with a built in screen and camera displayed ads and then tracked reactions to what the agency called the “genes” of the ad: copy, font, images, and more, tracing whether the faces of onlookers were happy or sad. An algorithm would then discard the ads that didn’t perform well in what M&C Saatchi called a sort of natural selection.

It was perhaps a slightly unfortunately accurate bit of symbolism. For one, at present artificial intelligence is notoriously bad at actually determining what emotion a human face might be displaying. More to the point, the idea of filtering and refining an ad to be its most effective mirrors a more insidious dimension of surveillance technology which not only tracks individual ruthlessly, but also subsequently categorizes them in little silos of identity or activity. In predicating the ad concept on a loosely Darwinian ideal, replete with an algorithm that veers just ever slightly too close to phrenology, M&C Saatchi also betrayed the trouble with surveillance for the public as they pitched its possibilities to clients.

That is the trouble with what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has labelled surveillance capitalism: in linking tracking with the profitability of ads and the products they peddle, we have instituted massive and massively invasive systems of technology.
Despite the high-minded rhetoric, the risk of entrenching those systems not just online but also in our streetscapes is that we shift those structures into the physical world. Just as digital algorithms have been used to deny mortgages to people of colour or mislabel dark-skinned individuals, when advertising also looks back it may replicate those same sort of 21st century inequities. There are movements to address this imbalance. The Algorithmic Justice League, for example, is an organization that uses both art and research to highlight the problems of AI and systems of surveillance.

After all, for all the flashy concepts, what is much more likely in the future of signage is rather more quotidian: that is, ads for banks, coffee, cars — not just that the increasing impossibility of walking around and not being bombarded with ads will only become more true, but that how an interactive billboard reacts to passers-by in Cabbagetown may be quite different than a few streets over in St. Jamestown. When advertising returns one’s gaze, it may well look at skin colour, bodies, clothing, and a host of other characteristics that are loaded with cultural baggage and import.

What thus becomes of concern is what ultimate effect there is on the psychogeographic terrain of a city when the city in turn is watching. Google’s Sidewalk Labs project, an ostensible smart city project that included sensors scattered around the imagined neighbourhood, never came to fruition because of the concerns around privacy and public space. Beyond specific questions of policy, there was also just the lingering worry about something going wrong — not just that when one was walking down the street, the very presence of sensors themselves was enough to be of concern, but that, say, sensors and cameras that may record crime could be used to exacerbate inequities in policing. That is the question here: that when private companies collect data as people move through public space, to whom does that data belong?

Just as troubling, however, is that sensors and cameras being scattered around the city turns streets into panopticons. The lesson of those prisons in which inmates are surveilled through opaque glass is that, at a certain point, it doesn’t matter if anyone is actually watching; the mere knowledge of being watched is enough to change and influence behaviour.

For now, much of the tension around signage itself is of the invasion and ultimate annexation of public space by capital. Machines run by algorithms are of course designed by humans but also have a logic of their own; there are only so many ways a lens and a series of chips placed above a billboard might see and categorize a person. That sense of being interpreted and interpellated by a machine – the eerie feeling when an ad for something appears after you’ve just briefly searched for it – would only be heightened by advertising that surveils.

The battle over signs – of where they may be placed, by whom, and to what degree – is one that can feel already lost. When our cities inevitably become populated with camera-laden billboards, bus shelter ads, and smart windows lining storefronts, that fight may seem more quaint still. Signs are a part of life, and it is hard to make sense of the places in which we live without them. When they look back, however, it may be difficult to recall what life was like before the street itself was full of eyes, returning a gaze, and in turn casting an invisible private shadow over what was supposed to be shared.