by Bobbie Fan
“Give me a sign!” We ask this of our gods and our prospective lovers. There is a distance here – the unknowable other, the unknowable future – that we hope to scale with the help of a sign.
The act of reading and interpreting our environment – what anthropologist David Graeber calls “interpretive labor” – can be completely emotionally consuming. This is where a sign comes in: to shortcut and dictate the act of interpretation. We use signs as an invisible lever to maneuver our emotions and actions.
My dad, a devout Christian, dreamed that the bowl he was eating from suddenly disappeared. In Chinese, one’s rice bowl is a literal expression of one’s livelihood and he interpreted this as a divine portent of future unemployment. After the dream he spoke to his manager expressing a desire to retire and he was let go in the next round of layoffs. He believes his dreams were a sign of the future – they also moved him to make that future real. Cecilia Vicuña writes “In Latin, the author is auspex, “a bird watcher,” who reads the signs of their flight. The auspex augments what is seen by combining the bird’s flight and the gaze that sees it.”
Signs operate in this space meant to suture past and present, internal and external.“Red flags” in the context of modern dating emerged as a way of understanding when to retreat from a budding relationship for safety. The red flags we see in others are an accumulation of our past, fixing a relationship into something legible – not just that, but also signalling out to us. ‘”Turn back! Turn back!’” This red flag is a ventriloquist’s puppet, we’ve made and set upon the other; it speaks in a voice that is at once our own and not our ownn our voice, not our voice. What we treat as an outside objective indicator that it’s time to run is still our own projection of fear.
Arlie Russel Hochschild first coined the term ‘emotional labor’ in 1983. Today, it is popularly understood as the energy expended feeling emotions, particularly in dealing with other people’s emotions; however there is . There’s an important distinction from this common usagee and the specific phenomenon Hochschild highlights in her of “emotional labor” from what Hochschild calls attention to in following the case studies of air stewardesses taught to smile when angered or debt collectors trained to suppress empathy. The labor itself occurs when one manipulates and alters the message we receive from our emotions about the world and how we want to respond to match a predetermined missive.
“Many emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. It is this signal function that is impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage.”
We are practiced at incorporating a sign as truth, a kernel of understanding about the world refined by our internal landscape of fears and desires. This practice of controlling our emotions from the outside-in, inside-out, is also the mechanism by which power works. The danger is in not recognizing the larger forces at work channeling this practice and the flow of our lives in the process.
We can turn to the surrealist treatment of the bilboquet to give form to our encounter with signs. A bilboquet is a ball and cup toy attached together by a string. According to developmental psychology studies, babies gradually learn through the movement of objects and humans how to form expectations about the rules that govern them. From infancy we gradually watch and learn. We learn that different laws govern the movements of things (continuous and predictable) from humans (dynamic and unpredictable). An internal landscape of these rules forms based on our memories. The bilboquet appears in that landscape to break the clean distinction of these rules. In Rene Magritte’s paintings, bilboquets cameo as a figure, a sculpture, a tree, a column – an anthropomorphic totem. Dreamily, it suggests companionship just as much as it suggests utter nihilism. This toy that plays on both the animacy of the object and the objectification of the living is what a sign is to our inner and outer worlds.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I went on a date in an indoor greenhouse. We were greeted from the entrance with a series of signs directing us on a specific path instead of the usual self-guided space to wander. I chafed at the signs, and finally in a room of desert specimens I tried to trespass in order to view a beautiful giant agave plant. ‘”It’s just a sign!’” My date got upset, pointing out that she couldn’t afford to be cheeky with rules as a Black woman in America. In the context of property and law where we encounter most of themsigns now, signs themselves are read as a threat through history in the body. These signs communicate from above, from an authority. I like to think of this as a discombobulated process of communication. All lines of command have a sort of telephone game passed along down the chain to reach you. A sign, posted by the authorities, is its lowliest foot soldier–, but its favorite, because signs do not require a living wage.
The legal legacy of signs is yawn-inducingly colonial. Official records of signs begin with a 1393 Act by King Richard requiring pubs and inns in Britain to bear an external sign in order to be tested. This account fits within the story of how “public space” was created via legal codifications of public and private property from thirteenth century England. Municipal authority established the basis of their authority on protecting and facilitating commerce.
Still serving this purpose today for public authorities, signs are a part of infrastructure that both connects and collapses space. In arriving at a new place, we no longer need to accumulate knowledge of where to go and what to expect. We can arrive without additional context, relying on the intentions of prior signmakers. It is a similar type of epistemological transformation as the index – replacing experiential, relational knowing with a reference system of written knowledge. Signs rewrite place into an index of commerce and property – addresses, grids, as well as an index of movement – stop, yield, park.
It wasn’t long ago that we primarily used maps and signs to navigate. GPS was initially a technology developed for war, only becoming available for commercial use in the year 2000. Turn-by-turn level accuracy was reached in 2004 with the installation of precision timekeeping in satellites, spurring the development of in-car navigation systems. In 2007, smartphone makers began incorporating GPS into their devices, simultaneously initiating a massive downstream dump of mobile phone trace location data that is now in turn commonly sold to urban planners.
In the Summer of 2019 I joined a cohort for the City of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics team. My project was open-ended, searching for an improvement to the current model of urban deliveries where big trucks got clogged in the arteries of smaller streets. It seemed in Boston, like other cities I had worked for – Chicago, Pittsburgh – had a love-hate relationship with their signs. Ford was on the doorstep, with promises of mapping city utility and sign infrastructure, which most cities didn’t have a complete inventory of. This generous offer was typical of self-driving car companies seeking to map infrastructure and roads to better enable public pilots for their vehicles. The city was attempting to make the temporal and conditional elements of law malleable so as to accommodate commercial traffic evolving to include rideshare and gig economy trips – a lobbying process at multiple levels of government. All this for what? More dynamic signage. The City of Boston, following a similar effort in DC, was pushing for new local ordinances that enabled the development of new signage regulating the curb. I helped as a human counter for their new “pickup dropoff” or “PUDO” zones that debuted in a shopping district in Boston, which created new geofenced zones and time limited curbs for rideshare and food delivery drivers. Some companies partnered with cities to offer on-demand parking zones, replacing traditional parking spaces with app-identified spaces. This type of governance matches a technocratic management of space. Digitizing curb management allows for regulation to take place in the app, which is in turn accompanied by a suite of data collection and analytics. It’s no accident that intense commercialization of mobility and goods is pressuring the shift to space as digitally regulated and determined, where space and time are spliced thinner and thinner to optimize economic activity.
Boston’s Pickup Dropoff Zone: Credit Boston Herald
In 2019, a teacher who had overstayed his visa, Mario Rodriguez, was deported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they accidentally scanned his license plate. Currently, Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology is employed en-masse, used by every major police bureau in the US with a force of 100 officers or more. Automated enforcement with license plate readers is the end game of dynamic curb solutions, with the short or unusual time windows presenting enforcement challenges solved by the addition of camera infrastructure employing ALPR technology. As cameras and computer vision glue digital and physical infrastructure, planner and cop become fully merged.
Pittsburgh’s Smart Loading Zone Program, Enforced by ALPRs
The largest ALPR vendor in the US currently is Flock Safety, luring in customers through offering access to its nationwide ALPR network. Flock represents the end result of urban planning’s thirst for data, in a nightmare marriage of mobility technology and carceral creep. In addition to enabling massive surveillance and deportation actions possible through (at times illegal) searches of license plate and location data for immigration enforcement, the company hawks the data to whoever will buy, making the data available also to commercial data brokers advertising “people lookup.”
The enforcement of traffic laws has always been a part of the structural violence of legal code. The cost of transforming land into property and law is physical violence, either in police encounters with racially profiled drivers and pedestrians, or through a system of fines and fees levied on those most unable to pay them, entrapping them in debtor’s jail or effective house arrest. The ramping up of automated enforcement via surveillance infrastructure extends the range of what Ruja Benjamin refers to as coded exposure, which “produce[s] illegality rather than screen for it.”
“Space always matters, and what we make of it in thought and practice determines, and is determined by, how we mix our creativity with the external world to change it and ourselves in the process.”
— Ruth Wilson Girlmore, Abolition Geography
In the Blue Ridge Mountains there is a tree whose trunk curves in an arch, its bark crowded with overlapping shingles in its underbelly. Named the “Dragon Tree,” it was painstakingly bent over time by Native Americans, two twin trunks shooting in from the end of its arch, forming an arrow. This labor represents a literal living caretaking of space and orientation.
The Dragon Tree in North Carolina
A sign is an interface between place and body. The sign is a disembodied communication from another, from the past, creating collective knowledge and conditions of a space.
The opportunity when meeting a sign is drawing upon the ability to reference your own personal judgements – do I agree with the values and assumptions imbued in this sign? A sign is dictating the context of your surroundings, while hiding its own context, the labyrinth of legal, bureaucratic, and industrial means that produced it.
I found my favorite cacophony of street signs while walking around the streets of New Orleans. Many signs asked people to pick up after their dog, to keep the neighborhood drug and gun free for the children. Some warned:
Wildlife crossing signs were appropriated to reflect free roaming feline spirit:
Near a cemetery were signs for the local candy lady – pickled okra, ice cream sandwiches, chicken wings with four sauces, all available through the window of her home.
“This is where I almost died,” a friend describes getting doored by a car and flung into traffic, injuring his hand and being unable to play before going on tour. A few blocks down is the silhouette of a ghost bike.
A ghost bike is usually painted white, wreathed in flowers, where a cyclist perished on the road. When I lived in Chicago, I began documenting ghost bikes as I walked and biked across the city. In 2015, the City overhauled Clybourn street with protected bike lanes when white bike advocate Bobby Cann was killed by a drunk driver. These drastic changes didn’t always happen. I used to pass Hector Avalos’ ghost bike vibrating from the force of traffic on my way to McKinely Park on the South side of Chicago, where infrastructure was harsher. Near the memorial, I once watched a woman wheel her way across 8 lanes in a wheelchair.
On June 10, 2015, a friend called me in the middle of my workday to tell me that my friend Emilly had ended up in a serious bike accident commuting that morning. Emilly was a friend who I had grown up with, a witness and orienting force as we both entered our early twenties. If I wanted to see her alive, I needed to see her as soon as possible. Late that night, a friend drove me down to her hospital room. She was in a coma. A small net that resembled the special padding for expensive fruit was wrapped around her head. She died the next day.
Her parents filed a lawsuit against the driver of the car, searching for some answer to their unquenchable grief. I fundraised with her family and friends for a magenta memorial bench that now greets bikers and walkers on the Ice Age Trail.
For Emilly’s ghost bike we used a banana seater that a friend had in his garage. I joined a group of her work friends to spray it white, weaving in a plaque and flowers. We laughed and talked, cutting out photos of her for a memorial book, and searched for the perfect purple lock – her favorite color. We wrapped the ghost bike around the crossing sign of the trail.
Four years later, neighbors removed the bike for safekeeping after the city tore up the intersection with changes, clearing the thicket of trees on both sides and moving the 35mph speed sign from the foot of the hill where she was hit to its top. As a mobility advocate, I lay my blame and anger on the city for not doing this earlier.
Emilly Zhu’s Ghost Bike
I do wish this humble memorial was still there. A ghost bike is usually a warning to the drivers. The plaques and names face the roadway. An angel of death’s past, asking something of the future – for more caution, more care, more memory.
As the sign attempts to speak, we can answer. Our world is not fixed by the state or the property owner. We can animate it with life ourselves.
One of the hardest conversations in my life took place at a greasy spoon down the street called Peppi’s Old Tyme Sandwich Shop. It was a classic American diner, where you could walk away with a loaded, oily meaty sandwich for cheap. Inside was tiled art deco style, with a row of booths and a ring of stools around the counter and an open kitchen. I passed its location one day and realized with shock that it had completely disappeared, leaving only a “for Lease” sign. Peppi’s had closed after two decades of business.
I felt mixed emotions in remembering what I had forgotten. My ex and I had grabbed greasy Peppi’s hoagies the day after she came back from a trip to catch up. She reveals something shocking as we bite into our sandwiches. “How does that make you feel?” I’m unable to speak. She gets angry, splattering mayo on concrete.
Peppi’s retro style steel facade was actually a classic diner architectural style modeled off of a train car, meant to lure in the evolving American car commuter passing by at 40 miles per hour. There was no way to tell it had once been there. I considered the relief of burying a haunting memory.
Not long after, I noticed Peppi’s absence in a new way through the developer’s “for Lease” sign. A layer of trash had appeared all over it, as if magnetized to a new gravitational field.
About the Author
This issue of Purée Mag was made possible through the support of the Generator Cooperative Art Production, 2025-26.