The relationship lies somewhere in the connections between the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Ray Bradbury story “The Toynbee Convector,” and the theory by historian Arnold Toynbee that the afterlife is synthetic. Or for that matter, what their strange message about Toynbee, 2001, and resurrecting the dead means. A 2011 documentary, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, offers a possible theory about the tiler, though it still leaves the question of why. The motivation for spreading these curious tiles across the eastern United States is perhaps the biggest mystery of all, along with the identity of the person responsible for creating and placing them across these cities. And there are hundreds of them that have been placed in various cities throughout the U.S., including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlantic City, New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. The tiles are believed to have been dropped into the street from a car during the summer months, and car and foot traffic, along with the sealant, act to fix the tiles in place, eventually becoming essentially permanently embedded into the street. since the 1980s, Toynbee Tiles can be best summarized as a public art project of indefinite purpose, made from linoleum and asphalt sealant. Showing up on the streets of the eastern U.S. Stroll through specific neighborhoods in cities along the East Coast and you’ll come across a colorful rectangle embedded into the asphalt featuring some variation of the cryptic phrase, “TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.” A number of inevitable questions come to mind: What is it? How did it get there? And what does it mean? Few mysteries in the modern era are as fascinatingly bizarre as that of the Toynbee Tile.
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