Background:

A common sight one sees when walking around LA is the taxicab business cards. They’re taped to light poles, scattered around bus stops, and ground into the pavement of the sidewalks. Representing many different taxi companies, each card displays some Photoshopped images and a phone number to call for a variety of needs: taxi to the airport, driver to drive to Illinois, delivery of alcohol or cigarettes, someone to call if you don’t want to drive home drunk. While some cards suggest a social media presence, you don’t need anything other than a phone call to use their services.

Over the course of many months we collected these cards, presenting them to you in a full audiovisual representation of our LA experience. 1-800-BAGGY comments on the nostalgia of the early internet and the internet’s impact on our concept of reality. Each card is situated within its environment and all its accompanying sights and sounds. A mini time capsule, transporting you away from your present reality.

Visual:

One important component of the early internet is lo-fi media: in earlier iterations of the internet, image quality didn’t matter to the same extent because it wasn’t available. This gave everything from that era an edgy, DIY effect. Our obsession with early skate videos has resulted in a collection of old VHS cameras, so to capture this digital nostalgia, we filmed several walks using each camera while going to and from our studios. For extra cinematic flair, we dropped the frame rate for each video, giving the token a spacey, dreamlike vibe.

To meld the cards with their moving backgrounds, we added animated glitter to the cards’ text using Glitterboo, a web app for children.

Audio:

The audio that accompanies each token recreates the experience of walking through the streets of Los Angeles where these taxi cards are found. A typical downtown “walk” features snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of music from a passing car, and various ambient noises from traffic and machinery. The tracks sample from various pieces of historic audio and field recordings and melded into a semi-abstracted pop song.

Each soundtrack contains three layers: A field recording taken with the iPhone Voice Memo app walking to and from gremlin’s studio A beat composed by sampling an existing song from one of three categories (La Raza 97.9, recorded via voice memo from a 1992 Sony Dream Machine radio alarm clock; songs by the performing artists at the Art Laboe Memorial Concert in LA; recordings ripped from YouTube of leaked songs by Chief Keef). A vocal track, composed of samples from voice recordings of author William Burroughs, early YouTuber Mr. ChiCity, or of two poems composed by gremlin and read by the author.

These layers are woven together to create a rhythm, a groove, and an elevated aural illustration; a typical walk through downtown Los Angeles.

Background:

A common sight one sees when walking around LA is the taxicab business cards. They’re taped to light poles, scattered around bus stops, and ground into the pavement of the sidewalks. Representing many different taxi companies, each card displays some Photoshopped images and a phone number to call for a variety of needs: taxi to the airport, driver to drive to Illinois, delivery of alcohol or cigarettes, someone to call if you don’t want to drive home drunk. While some cards suggest a social media presence, you don’t need anything other than a phone call to use their services.

Over the course of many months we collected these cards, presenting them to you in a full audiovisual representation of our LA experience. 1-800-BAGGY comments on the nostalgia of the early internet and the internet’s impact on our concept of reality. Each card is situated within its environment and all its accompanying sights and sounds. A mini time capsule, transporting you away from your present reality.

Visual:

One important component of the early internet is lo-fi media: in earlier iterations of the internet, image quality didn’t matter to the same extent because it wasn’t available. This gave everything from that era an edgy, DIY effect. Our obsession with early skate videos has resulted in a collection of old VHS cameras, so to capture this digital nostalgia, we filmed several walks using each camera while going to and from our studios. For extra cinematic flair, we dropped the frame rate for each video, giving the token a spacey, dreamlike vibe.

To meld the cards with their moving backgrounds, we added animated glitter to the cards’ text using Glitterboo, a web app for children.

Audio:

The audio that accompanies each token recreates the experience of walking through the streets of Los Angeles where these taxi cards are found. A typical downtown “walk” features snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of music from a passing car, and various ambient noises from traffic and machinery. The tracks sample from various pieces of historic audio and field recordings and melded into a semi-abstracted pop song.

Each soundtrack contains three layers: A field recording taken with the iPhone Voice Memo app walking to and from gremlin’s studio A beat composed by sampling an existing song from one of three categories (La Raza 97.9, recorded via voice memo from a 1992 Sony Dream Machine radio alarm clock; songs by the performing artists at the Art Laboe Memorial Concert in LA; recordings ripped from YouTube of leaked songs by Chief Keef). A vocal track, composed of samples from voice recordings of author William Burroughs, early YouTuber Mr. ChiCity, or of two poems composed by gremlin and read by the author.

These layers are woven together to create a rhythm, a groove, and an elevated aural illustration; a typical walk through downtown Los Angeles.

Background:

A common sight one sees when walking around LA is the taxicab business cards. They’re taped to light poles, scattered around bus stops, and ground into the pavement of the sidewalks. Representing many different taxi companies, each card displays some Photoshopped images and a phone number to call for a variety of needs: taxi to the airport, driver to drive to Illinois, delivery of alcohol or cigarettes, someone to call if you don’t want to drive home drunk. While some cards suggest a social media presence, you don’t need anything other than a phone call to use their services.

Over the course of many months we collected these cards, presenting them to you in a full audiovisual representation of our LA experience. 1-800-BAGGY comments on the nostalgia of the early internet and the internet’s impact on our concept of reality. Each card is situated within its environment and all its accompanying sights and sounds. A mini time capsule, transporting you away from your present reality.

Visual:

One important component of the early internet is lo-fi media: in earlier iterations of the internet, image quality didn’t matter to the same extent because it wasn’t available. This gave everything from that era an edgy, DIY effect. Our obsession with early skate videos has resulted in a collection of old VHS cameras, so to capture this digital nostalgia, we filmed several walks using each camera while going to and from our studios. For extra cinematic flair, we dropped the frame rate for each video, giving the token a spacey, dreamlike vibe.

To meld the cards with their moving backgrounds, we added animated glitter to the cards’ text using Glitterboo, a web app for children.

Audio:

The audio that accompanies each token recreates the experience of walking through the streets of Los Angeles where these taxi cards are found. A typical downtown “walk” features snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of music from a passing car, and various ambient noises from traffic and machinery. The tracks sample from various pieces of historic audio and field recordings and melded into a semi-abstracted pop song.

Each soundtrack contains three layers: A field recording taken with the iPhone Voice Memo app walking to and from gremlin’s studio A beat composed by sampling an existing song from one of three categories (La Raza 97.9, recorded via voice memo from a 1992 Sony Dream Machine radio alarm clock; songs by the performing artists at the Art Laboe Memorial Concert in LA; recordings ripped from YouTube of leaked songs by Chief Keef). A vocal track, composed of samples from voice recordings of author William Burroughs, early YouTuber Mr. ChiCity, or of two poems composed by gremlin and read by the author.

These layers are woven together to create a rhythm, a groove, and an elevated aural illustration; a typical walk through downtown Los Angeles.