Street Discussion + Electronics

LCD presents the following instructions:
  1. Please use the dial to read instructions.

  2. Find an interesting person.

  3. Ask the person what is the Miracle of Chile?

  4. Reset the dial and give it to the person.

Three simple circuits consisting of an Atmel8, LCD, potentiometer, two LEDs, an on/off switch and a battery are mounted onto broken street tiles from the city of Santiago. The tiles with the circuits are placed back onto the sidewalk with a set of instructions for interested pedestrians. Curious pedestrians, pickup the piece of sidewalk and are presented with the instructions above.

We remained in eyesight of the brick. Once the interactions began, we intervened to further discuss the phrase "Miracle of Chile" and the placement of the circuit onto a tile from the sidewalk. We explained that it is an art project, we explained the origin of the phrase and that the instructions are mounted onto a brick to reference the document that the Chicago Boys wrote in 1973 called "El Ladrillo" (the brick) - the document that set Chile upon a neoliberal economic path, the first country to firmly embrace neoliberal philosophy.

The people who interacted with the brick presented a very wide economic demographic: a Peruvian orange juice vendor, two blue-collar employees of the Catholic University, two university professors and two wealthy students from the university. Amongst the replies to the Miracle of Chile were: "I don't know;" "There is no miracle of Chile;" "Neruda and the people of Chile;" "The Atacama Dessert and Andes." Each discussion reflected very different interpretations and amongst them deep sentiment toward the economy.


Special thanks to Nicolás Spencer for video production!