So: Funny Village Voice article about Elliot Malkin's digital graffiti project, eRuv: A Street History in Semacode.
Malkin's project uses semacode posters, which have these funky-looking barcodes that, when photographed with a camera phone, will direct your phone's internet browser to a specific url. Pretty cool, but lost on people who, like me, don't invest much money in their phones.
Anyway, Malkin uses semacode to mark (well, partially) the former path of the Third Avenue el—and his project is called eruv (a Hebrew word roughly meaning a physically delimited communal area) because in 1907 one Rabbi Yehoshua Siegel used the el's path as the western border to an eruv encompassing the entire east side of Manhattan (the other boundaries being water). Why make the whole east side one community? Because, according to Talmudic law you can only carry things around on Shabbat inside your home or eruv. As the eruv wikipedia article points out, that law's a big bummer if you don't have an eruv: "the law on carrying created severe hardships and diminished the oneg ("joy") of Shabbat."
The Village Voice calls Siegel's eruvification of the east side a maphack ahead of its time, but it seems more—dare I say it?—like a lifehack to me: a creative way of getting stuff done within the restrictive parameters of your existence…and of guaranteeing the entire east side an onegful Shabbat.
[...] Elliott Malkin, kenspeckle for his eRuv: A Street History in Semacode project, is still keeping busy digitizing both religion and his family's history. a transmission still from Elliott Malkin's Modern Orthodox eruv [...]
[...] semacode was the only funky-looking way to give your cell phone camera information (such as, say, a history of eruvim), when Anne Helmond (who's been blogging her way to an M.A. thesis on WordPress! ) pointed out the [...]
[...] world" programmed into wheat field In Digital Matrix, the basis of semacode. (tags: art programming semacode weird [...]
[...] barcodes have come a long way since then. There are semacodes, which I first learned about via Lauren's blogging of Eliot Malkin's eRuv project a few years ago (information about eruvin and [...]
[...] of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with [...]