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Photos/Video: The Occupy Wall Street "Bat Signal" Projections
By
Jen Carlson
Published Nov 18, 2011
Modified Nov 18, 2011
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Nov 18, 2011
Modified Nov 18, 2011
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Last night during the Occupy Wall Street march, projections of encouragement were spotted all over some of the city's buildings (mainly the Verizon building, which has never looked so good).
The projections energized the protesters, and set a more celebratory mood for the night—the 2 month anniversary of the movement. The projections could be seen from very far away, sort of like the Bat Signal, and transmitted messages like: It Is The Beginning Of The Beginning, Look Around, You Are Part Of A Global Uprising, We Are Unstoppable, Another World Is Possible, 99%, Mic Check!, Occupy Earth, Occupy Wall Street, and so on—you can see it in action in the video below. Now Boing Boing has tracked down the man behind the signal, 45-year-old Mark Read, who tells them:
It came up at an action coordination meeting. We were talking about what to do on the 17th, about the decentralized way the day would progress, attacking the exchange from different angles. We had a sense that the morning on Wall Street would be forceful and confrontational, and we wanted to not do the same kind of thing in the afternoon. Initial talks focused on having a thousand people taking the bridge in the afternoon, and continuing in a militant mode of activism. But we started thinking about creating a more unifying moment. A celebration of the birthday of Occupy Wall Street. Maybe taking the roadway and having lots of arrests might not be best thing. What if we took the pedestrian walkway, and gave out LED candles? We would give out 10,000 LED tea candles, a river of light streaming over the walkway. And a guy named Hero, who has been central to a lot of facets of the occupation since the beginning, turns to me and says, "We need a bat signal. The 99%."
Read operated out of an apartment opposite the Verizon building, offered to him by a stranger who answered his call from flyers he had put up in the city housing building. The single mother living on the 16th floor told him "let's do this," and wouldn't accept any money for the use of her home.
We highly recommend you read the entire interview over at Boing Boing.
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bat signal
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occupy wall street
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Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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