Field notes
Reading the AI era from the street.
A billboard is a small piece of a much larger story. Sightings keeps a photographic notebook of what companies choose to say in public.
What companies choose to say
A walk through a city offers a different view of technology from a product announcement. A company has a limited space in which to make itself understood. It chooses a few words, an image, a promise. Those choices become part of the surroundings of people who may never open the product.
Sightings is RingRing’s photographic notebook of those encounters. It begins in San Francisco, where the project is based, and records company messages as they appear on the streets.
A photograph does not tell us whether a product works, whether a claim is justified or how a company will develop. It preserves something more specific: what was visible, in a place, at a moment.
Keep the surroundings in the frame
The street matters. A message sits beside buildings, traffic, windows and people going about their day. Keeping that context helps the photograph remain a record of a place rather than simply another version of a company’s advertisement.
Location and date give that record a way back. A street name makes an encounter easier to place. A date helps us understand the order in which messages appeared. Neither needs to turn a photograph into a claim about the whole city.
The photographs in Sightings are records of what was spotted, not endorsements or evidence that a company has purchased space on the Wall. Those are different ways to participate in RingRing.
An ordinary notebook, over time
A single photograph can be a curiosity. A collection gives us a chance to return and look more carefully. Which words did companies use to describe their work? What did they assume people wanted? What did they need to explain?
Those observations can sit beside the perspectives of the people living through the same period. The messages companies put into the world and the words people use about their lives will not always match. That difference is worth noticing.
You can browse the photographs on Sightings, open an individual image or embed the latest photographs on another website. The notebook grows as new sightings are published.
A record of a changing world.
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