We made this sign out of a lightbox we had originally built for our camp at Burning Man. Given the shenanigans going on in the White House, we decided on a better use for it than leaving it sitting in the garage: peaceful protest in bold, American colors!
The front panel is a sheet of translucent white plexi with a wooden frame. The bottom and back are some kind of nasty composite board, cheap and ugly but strong. We coated the inside with tinfoil to make it reflect more light. The light source is three 40W fluorescents driven off a standard 120V AC source, which we powered using an inverter plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The wiring is not a mess, it is an interpretive abstract sculpture.
We made the letters out of colored acetate (you can buy it for a few bucks a yard), drafting them first on paper by hand (don't let anyone tell you that high school drafting isn't useful in real life) and tracing them with an x-acto knife. We scotch-taped them backwards onto a sheet of clear acetate, which we then flipped around and duck-taped onto the plexi front panel. This way, if we should want to change the message later (e.g. in the unlikely event that Bush & co. decide they don't want control over the Iraqi oil fields after all and thus cancel the war) it'll be easy for us to change.
Mounting the sign on the roof rack involved a ridiculous amount of last-minute drilling, knot-tying, duct tape, and clamps.
We parked the sign on a freeway overpass, visible from a pretty great distance from the 101 as people enter San Francisco from the south. There was pretty consistent traffic throughout the evening. We passed the time eating delicious Mission burritos and arguing about which direction had the most traffic.
The sign was very bright. Three 40W fluorescent bulbs make quite a lot of light.
Later that night, we decided to drive around town with the sign and see how people would react. It was a Saturday night and we did the opposite of what any sane San Franciscan would do: we sought out the busiest, most traffic-clogged streets to drive down, maximizing our visibility among pedestrians.
This woman (above) was great. She jumped and screamed and whooped at us, and asked where we had rented the sign from. As if there's a business somewhere that rents out anti-war signs... hey, now that's not a bad idea!
Some people thought we were a taxi and tried to get in the car.
A surprising number of people didn't seem to notice the sign at all, I guess because of all the other bright lights in the city. But those who did notice were predominantly very approving, and we got many spontaneous thumbs-up and peace-signs from random walkers and drivers of all shapes and sizes.
Protest makes you feel good. Let's hope it also makes a difference.
We brought the sign out again to coincide with Bush's state-of-the-union address. We got a primo spot right in the middle of the overpass. Here's a very blurry picture of the sign as it looked from the freeway. Quite hard to miss!
This time we used the sign for a bit of pre-rally advertising. After our requisite couple of hours over the freeway, we drove around North Beach for a while, handing out flyers for the March 15th rally. I thought the sign went really well with all the neon.
We brought our sign out to the spontaneous protest that went on all day and night in response to the commencement of bombing in Iraq. This was a completely different experience from parking over the freeway. (More photos)
-Cassidy Curtis and friends.