Thanks to certain people on this site, I have become a regular reader of Dinosaur Comics. Ryan North, the comic's author, was recently interviewed by The Torontoist, which mentioned a rather interesting incident...
Originally posted by The Torontoist:
You were recently involved in the arrest of some 15 year old girls in Ravenna, Ohio. What happened?
A friend of mine who goes by the name “Posterchild”, because some of what he does is technically illegal, made these three cubes and painted them so they looked like the question blocks from Mario Brothers and put them up in Windsor. The politics behind it was that public spaces can be grey and uniform, especially in a town like Windsor. Why is it that you can put up an advertisement in a park or street, but you can’t put art there? His idea was that instead of putting art in a gallery, he’d put art in the streets. People react and respond to it: you get the public engaged in their environment. I put up a website a year ago with instructions, and people made their own blocks all over the States, Australia and the U.K. I found one in Toronto, it’s up in my living room right now.
On April 1st this year, these girls in Ravenna made some boxes and people who saw them called the police. The anti-terrorism squad got called in to diffuse them, as if they were bombs.
[Torontoist and Ryan snicker]
I shouldn’t laugh. I ended up updating the site, warning that if you don’t know what the Mario Brothers are, a big box with a question mark on it might seem like a bomb. From what I heard, the Mayor of Ravenna was pissed that they had wasted the bomb squad’s time and money and wanted to find a way to make the girls pay for it. They were trying to find something they could charge the girls with and throw them in jail, but they couldn’t because there wasn’t a law prohibiting it. Since the press was watching the story, the town said that they wouldn’t charge the girls if they wrote a letter of apology to every law enforcement agency involved saying that they wouldn’t do it again. The girls said they were making t-shirts for themselves and some teachers that had been supportive with a question block on the front and the phrase “NOT A BOMB” written on the back.
When the story broke, I started getting 4-5 e-mails a minute. The story ended up getting reported on all the major cultural websites, and I even got an e-mail from Jack Thompson, the video game crusader, who called ME a jerk. But he’s belligerent and crazy.
A friend of mine who goes by the name “Posterchild”, because some of what he does is technically illegal, made these three cubes and painted them so they looked like the question blocks from Mario Brothers and put them up in Windsor. The politics behind it was that public spaces can be grey and uniform, especially in a town like Windsor. Why is it that you can put up an advertisement in a park or street, but you can’t put art there? His idea was that instead of putting art in a gallery, he’d put art in the streets. People react and respond to it: you get the public engaged in their environment. I put up a website a year ago with instructions, and people made their own blocks all over the States, Australia and the U.K. I found one in Toronto, it’s up in my living room right now.
On April 1st this year, these girls in Ravenna made some boxes and people who saw them called the police. The anti-terrorism squad got called in to diffuse them, as if they were bombs.
[Torontoist and Ryan snicker]
I shouldn’t laugh. I ended up updating the site, warning that if you don’t know what the Mario Brothers are, a big box with a question mark on it might seem like a bomb. From what I heard, the Mayor of Ravenna was pissed that they had wasted the bomb squad’s time and money and wanted to find a way to make the girls pay for it. They were trying to find something they could charge the girls with and throw them in jail, but they couldn’t because there wasn’t a law prohibiting it. Since the press was watching the story, the town said that they wouldn’t charge the girls if they wrote a letter of apology to every law enforcement agency involved saying that they wouldn’t do it again. The girls said they were making t-shirts for themselves and some teachers that had been supportive with a question block on the front and the phrase “NOT A BOMB” written on the back.
When the story broke, I started getting 4-5 e-mails a minute. The story ended up getting reported on all the major cultural websites, and I even got an e-mail from Jack Thompson, the video game crusader, who called ME a jerk. But he’s belligerent and crazy.
