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fonts, which would be legible on any device from cell phones to billboards. She then invited the public to submit texts via SMS, the web and wap, which appeared on three electronic billboards in downtown São Paulo. According to Beiguelman, «The nomadic reader is someone who reads on the move, in mobile phones and PDAs, in accordance to entropy and acceleration logic, it is a kind of multi-task reader adapted to distributed content who reads in between, while doing other things… Poétrica seeks that reader: the inhabitant of the global city.»

Tim Etchell’s proposed «Alphabet Billboard Cambridge» (2003) combines aspects of a community platform with electronic billboards. Every week, one inhabitant of Cambridge (England) is able to, essentially, use a 7.5 m billboard as a photo blog, documenting their personal «image of the city» of Cambridge. Over the three-year lifespan of the project, these individuals’ phlogs combine to create a community-based portrait of the city for view by both locals and visitors as they drive by.

 

Telematic Media

In their excellent resource, «Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality,» authors Randall Packer and Ken Jordan argue that the future of media was first expressed in Richard Wagner’s notion of the gesamstkunstwerk and that in the 150 years since convergence is the defining characteristic of what they call multimedia. «By proposing that the Dynabook be a ‹meta-medium› that unifies all media within a single interactive interface, Alan Kay had glimpsed into the future,» they write. [36]

Whether one considers this a stifling or liberating vision of the future, there is no question that the boundaries between media defined primarily by their technical description—radio, telephone, television, Internet—are breaking down. In 1985 Eduardo Kac created the videotex animated poem «Reabracadabra.» In 2003, he adapted it for cell phone displays, and in the example of Beiguelman, she created her font so it could be displayed on multiple devices, since the texts would be transmitted in multiple ways. In 2002 r a d i o q u a l i a (Honor Harger and Adam Hyde) began broadcasting «Free Radio Linux», an automated reading over the Internet, and at times on radio, 4,141,432 of

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