Toynbee Skeleton

They are created by unknown guerrilla street artist's from corrugated plastic, vinyl records, burlap sacks, scraps of wood, metal, or cloth. The robot figure, dubbed Stickman, is a spin off art-form of the Toynbee Tiles, and can be seen from Boston to Hollywood, it has been spotted on building walls, newspaper vending machines, and traffic signs, but stickman is seen most often in crosswalks as a sticker pasted to the pavement. At first, I found something zombielike about stikman, but now I think the stickman is a walking skeleton. It's seems to me this is the best way to represent the resurrection of the dead in a piece of tile glued to asphalt. He's a wallflower at a party of tourists and nine-to-fivers. He's shy, awkward and often frozen alone in traffic. The Toynbee Stickman should actually be called The Toynbee Skeleton. The Skeleton figure representing death, and it's pose of walking representing it's resurrection.

Be sure to see my new music video staring the Toynbee Skeleton who thanks to my simple animation now walks. [link]

The "Toynbee Tiles" are messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American capitals. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate, but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation on the following inscription:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE` 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER.

Some of the more elaborate tiles also feature cryptic political statements or exhort readers to create and install similar tiles of their own. The material used for making the tiles was long a mystery, but evidence has emerged that they may be primarily made of layers of linoleum and asphalt crack-filling compound.