Artists at LaGuardia Are Delivering Personalized Short Stories to Passengers' Phones

Passengers traveling through Marine Air Terminal (Terminal A) at New York's LaGuardia Airport (LGA) can get a personalized story sent to their phone upon landing.

Landing Pages, the first project from ArtPort Residency — a new program of the Queens Council on the Arts — allows passengers to stop by and have a story created for them. The story will be sent to their phone before they land at their destination.

ArtPort Residency, in partnership with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, hosts a new set of artists every three months at LaGuardia. The current artists in charge of Landing Pages are Lexie Smith and Gideon Jacobs. When passengers arrive at the Landing Pages, they grab a ticket and fill out the necessary information including flight number and contact information.

When passengers land at their destination and turn on their phone, a new story from Landing Pages will be in their text messages or email. Many of the stories revolve around a fictional narrative and, unsurprisingly, many of them are travel-related stories. Stories, though, can be poems or illustrations; there are no strict guidelines except for the word count, which is determined by the duration of the flight, since they all need to be completed before the passenger lands.

A story for a Delta passenger describes a woman sitting on a porch watching planes fly by. Another story for an Alaska Airlines passenger follows a child's adventure on the first day of spring.

“Every trip on an airplane embodies a traditional form of storytelling,” Smith told Hyperallergic. "It has a beginning, middle, and end at landing. Airline travel is stressful, hurried, and rarely are the surprises welcome ones.”

Smith and Jacobs hope that their efforts at Landing Pages will ease passenger woes just a little.

Read their archived stories here.

Image by myLoupe/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.