Screening in Times Square — Typography at the Crossroads of the World
- Ben Sheppee
- Apr 26, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
In 2023, my work was screened on the digital billboards of Times Square in New York — the most watched screens in the world, seen by an estimated 330,000 people daily.
Scale and Context
Times Square is a strange and compelling context for art. It's the ultimate public screen — a place where commercial advertising, news tickers, and cultural content compete for attention in an overwhelming torrent of light and information. Showing typographic work here — work that investigates how written form carries meaning — felt conceptually resonant. Times Square is itself a kind of typographic environment: a space where language is constantly broadcast, consumed, and discarded.
The work shown was drawn from my ongoing typographic investigations — characters from global writing systems presented as visual form rather than readable text. Against the context of Times Square's commercial messaging, the illegibility of the work became its strength. In a space where every other screen is trying to be understood, to sell something, to communicate a message with maximum clarity, presenting language as pure visual form created a moment of friction. A pause in the information flow.
Public Art at Scale
Showing work in public contexts — whether projected onto buildings in King's Lynn, installed in the London Stock Exchange, or screened in Times Square — raises different questions than showing in a gallery. The audience hasn't chosen to be there. They haven't read a press release or walked through a gallery door with certain expectations. They encounter the work by accident, in transit, as part of the texture of their day.
That accidental encounter is something I value. It's closer to how language actually works — we're immersed in written form constantly, rarely stopping to consider its visual properties or cultural origins. Public screenings create opportunities for that stop, however brief.
The Times Square screening was part of a broader year of activity that also included exhibitions in Sao Paulo and London. Each context — a Brazilian gallery, a New York billboard, a London exhibition space — revealed different qualities in the same body of work.
