Famous Hitch Hikers’ Safety Assured by Fine Art Registry™ Tags — Part 1
by David Charles - 7/17/2006
Continued...
The Security of the Hitchhiker: Enter the Fine Art Registry
Another key point was the security of the hitchhikers.
“In the past most of the hitchhikers that I’ve done have just disappeared,” explains Jim Pallas, who has set 28 of these hitchhikers loose over the years. He would select a person–a living person until recently–and tell them he wanted to do a hitchhiker of them and they had to agree to write something on the back of it and then within a year abandon it, in good faith, leave it some place where it’s out of their control.
“When I gave it to them it was out of my hands and they chose when and where within a year to abandon it,” he says. Usually people would write something on the back, trying to get the hitchhiker to a destination of a relative or a friend or some place like that and then they would set it on the side of the road. “Usually it would just disappear and we’d never hear of it again. Occasionally information would surface. Someone would spot it nailed behind the counter in a restaurant or in an antique shop or something like that. I never made any attempt to recover any of them because my attitude was, once they’re abandoned, I didn’t want to put any claim on them. If the person set it out there wanted to try to recover it whether it got to its destination or turned out some other place, that was their problem.”
However, people complained about them not showing up. “So I thought, well, there might be a way of giving the person who picks the hitchhiker up after it’s abandoned, a reason for not keeping it,” Jim explains. He suspected the reason people may have kept them–they’re a cool objects and you can put it in the basement next to the bar–but also he thinks that in some people’s minds they recognized that it could be some kind of art project and maybe some day it would be worth a lot of money and could send their kid through college on it or something. “In my experience of selling art that’s pretty unrealistic,” says Jim, but I understand that after I’m dead…”
So he came up with the idea of offering a legitimate share in the ownership of the piece to someone who plays along with it as long as the subject of the hitchhiker would agree to it.
The Pioneers in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight hitchhikers carry a notice on the back. This one for Frederick Terman is typical and includes the following:
Attention:
This hitchhiker is part of an art project associated with
The International Society of Electronic Arts
ZeroOne San Jose Festival.
You can qualify to share of ownership in this hitchhiker.
Here are the details:
This art object was made to acknowledge the contribution of Frederick Terman to the development of modern technology, particularly in "Silicon Valley". We want Fred to go to Stanford's Engineering Department, (Terman Building, room 214) in San Jose, California by August 12, 2006.
Fred is equipped with a cheap GPS-type circuit which permits his whereabouts to be tracked. Please do not tamper or disconnect as this is essential to the success of our art project.
We would like for 5 people to be involved in moving the piece. Therefore, the first three people to move the artwork toward its destination will qualify for 5% ownership of the piece. If a 4th person does a portion of the transporting, then the first three people may each qualify for a 10% share of the piece. The 4th person qualifies for a 5% share, but if that person can get a 5th person to deliver it to Stanford, then both the 4th and 5th persons will be eligible for 9% ownership in the piece. However, if it takes more than 5 people to get Fred to Stanford, 48% of the piece will be divided equally amount the total number of people it too to get Fred to his destination. Anyone can deliver Fred to Stanford at any point. The percentages will then be determined by the number people involved in his journey as outlined above.
If you wish to be part of this project, add your name and contact information in the space below. Next, show Fred a good time. He's been away a long time. Take him on an adventure, do something fun, snap some pics, or write a report. After you and Fred have had a few laffs, find the next person to go toward Stanford and give Fred to them. If you can't find someone suitable, you can leave Fred in a public place. Using a delivery service, such as United Parcel Service, will disqualify you. Fred is supposed to hitchhike to California as part of our project.
Certificates of shares will be issued after Fred arrives at Stanford. He must arrive on or before August 12, 2006. You will also be invited to an August 12 event in the San Francisco Bay Area as our honored guest once you register to receive a share.
"Fred" is registered with fineartregistry.com.
If he does not arrive at its destination,
the artist will record this art object as
lost or stolen at fineartregistry.com.
For more information on this project, go to
http://www.ylem.org/Hitchhikers/
“I can’t say enough about Fine Art Registry,” says Jim who stumbled across FAR just in time to order the tags needed so he could tag and register the famous five before he crated them and shipped them off. “It solved a problem. The particular problem for me with these hitchhikers is how to make sure the ‘shares’ scheme actually worked.” Now that he has tagged and registered these five sculptures and they are safely recorded in the FAR database, anyone trying to steal them is going to have a tough time selling them because they will be recorded as stolen and a buyer only needs to check on the Fine Art Registry website before buying to see that they would be purchasing stolen art.
Just the beginning
Obviously this project is still in its early stages but things are changing fast. The first two hitchhikers are rolling their way (we hope not winging their way) to their starting locations. You can already track them live. The other three are en route across country so that they too can be abandoned to the mercy of Silicon Valley motorists.
You can follow their progress here on the Fine Art Registry website as you can be sure we will be following their pilgrimages. We will also bring you a full report of the outcome of all of this. FAR is very pleased to be able to help with the security of the hitchhikers.
The project, for all its fun, has some very interesting aspects. It’s ironic that the technology invented may years ago by these very men who have been let loose on the side of the road is now being used to track their progress, to map their route, to bring the story to the public.
It’s almost a full circle back to the inventors of the devices.
And it is highly fitting that the thousands of digital artists who attend ZeroOne should find out through high tech media what it was that turned the Valley of Heart’s Delight into Silicon Valley and changed this civilization forever.
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