Targeting the 'Art' Around Every Corner

"It's about the personal experience," Shapins says. "There are stories in these arrows that you can't find in a conventional map."

Most of the postings on Yellowarrow.net are more playful and poetic than pointed, but some people have used the project to create action.

Aeck, for example, chose as one of her targets a place called Cafe Collage, on T Street near 14th, next to the restaurant Cafe Saint-Ex. She lives nearby and used to hang out there before it was closed down because of permit problems. She'd like to do so again, so she sticks an arrow just below the front window. Her message:

open Collage! a meeting place for artists and writers. The waitresses at Cafe SaintX next door can tell you how to contribute to Collages revival.

Howard Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs," "The Virtual Community" and other writings that deal with communication technology's role in activating communities, says he likes the idea of collective voices like these.

"There are two separate but connected issues here," Rheingold says. "One, using the cyber-world to connect people's opinions, information and places in the physical world. The other is the bottom-up part: People making things happen, and even changing policies, from the bottom up."

Shapins says the company has been approached with ideas from a variety of groups, including bicycle advocates in Boston seeking to create safer streets and politicians in Europe who think arrows might be useful in election campaigns.

And it's not the only project of its kind. Another New York-based effort, Grafedia (a melding of "graffiti" and "multimedia") lets people set up e-mail addresses using the @grafedia.net suffix, and then automatically send out images, videos or sound files to others who message them. Murmur, based in Toronto, works like Yellow Arrow but returns audio recordings instead of text messages.

Rheingold says the trend is exciting, but the arrows themselves are a sticky issue for him.

"I would really like to see this yellow arrow as a temporary on-ramp to something very virtual," Rheingold says. "I would hate to see the world covered with more debris."

Kenneth Bryson, a D.C. police spokesman, doesn't sound too thrilled, either.

"We can certainly appreciate arts projects," Bryson says. But "when it comes to defacing property, we ask that citizens cooperate with their local law enforcement." (Yellow Arrow discourages placing arrows on private property without permission.)

Aeck says that she doesn't want to see a city full of arrows, "but the positive aspects of the project outweigh the reservations I have about it." And so she goes back out into the streets with sheets of yellow arrows in her bag, ready to aim her thoughts at the heart of the city.