New Yorkers: You know that annoying Taxi TV feature that you usually turn off when you get into a cab, in favor of a conversation on your cell phone, or just blissful silence? For the next week, you’ll want to leave it on. Artist Amir Baradaran is doing a video project in 6,300 New York taxi cabs, and if you’re lucky enough to hail one of them — and if you’re paying attention — you might just catch one of the most interesting urban interventions in quite a while.

For the work, titled "Transient," the 33-year-old Baradaran — who achieved some notoriety during the run of Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” show at MoMA when he arrived dressed like her for a guerrilla performance he called "The Other Artist Is Present" — has woven 40-second videos of cab drivers peering at the passenger through their rear-view mirror into the very fabric of the Taxi TV program. Beginning today and running through September 15, the regular cycle of news and advertisements will stop for a moment and one of Baradaran’s 14 videos will take over. Around 1.5 million passengers are expected to see the videos, explains Nazy Nazhand, whose organization, AME Projects, is promoting the artwork as a way of injecting thoughtful creativity into the taxi experience.

Baradaran, whose Iranian family emigrated from Tehran to Montreal when he was a child, says his inspiration for the project came after he relocated to New York last year and was struck by the ubiquity of taxis as a symbol of the city's culture — and by how much the experience of riding in them is determined by the partition between passenger and driver. The driver, he observed, tends to all but disappear. “As much as the taxi itself is visible, the man or woman driving it is quite invisible,” he says. “I started thinking about the racial and class dynamics around that, and the project built and built.”

Last March, while New York’s taxi drivers were being assailed in the news for purportedly manipulating the new electronic fare systems to overcharge customers, Baradaran began trying to capture drivers, with their consent, on camera. It was no easy task, especially given the paranoia many of them felt around cameras during to the controversy. “It was an arduous task, because at the time the media was demonizing them,” he says. “I would show up with a camera, and nine out of ten drivers would turn me down. A lot of them are very new to America, so there are also cultural barriers.”

Initially, he planned to show the short films he’d made in the context of a gallery exhibition, but quickly realized it would be far more powerful to show them in the taxis themselves. “I’m interested in infiltrating institutions,” he says. “I wanted to find a way of interrupting the flow.” He figured the taxi TV systems recently installed in cabs gave him the perfect opportunity for this.

What he didn’t understand at first was how much persistence would be required to get the numerous agencies involved, including the Taxi and Limousine Commission, to sign on to the project. That four-month process was finally wrapped up two weeks ago. “They weren’t used to being approached by an artist,” he says. “They are more used to big corporations looking to do advertising, things like that, which they accommodate.” Once he did manage to get permission, there were more hurdles in getting them to understand the format that was necessary to make the project work aesthetically.

View Slideshow: What's Wrong With the TV in Your Taxi? It Just Might Be Art

“I explained that all the other features had to be removed from the video page so that my video briefly takes over the whole monitor,” he says. “That was a difficult negotiation.” So what convinced them to let him do it his way? “My persistence," says Baradaran. "Not letting them get away with saying no. There were a lot of people involved, and a lot of phone conversations. It was a lot of ‘us versus them,’ and I think that tension became part of the project.”

Baradaran isn’t the first artist to do a project involving New York’s taxis. In spring 2001, the Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul, on the invitation of Public Art Fund and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, took over a whole corner of Manhattan’s Madison Square Park with his project “I Love Taxi.” A sprawling installation of comic books, benches, and a food stand, it came out of stories he collected from New York cab drivers with the cooperation of the Long Island City-based Checker Cab Company.
(Some might remember that company as the same taxi business where the legendary late art collector Robert Scull made his millions.)

Assembling his project, Baradaran was impressed by the long hours that cabbies work, and the sometimes trying conditions of their jobs. He hopes that his videos will help taxi passengers better connect with the experience of drivers, but also to live in the moment, rather than focusing just on their destinations. “We live our lives in a way were we don’t always pay attention to the journey,” he says. “I wanted to turn the cab into its own kind of destination. If Buddha were in a cab in New York, perhaps he would enjoy his ride in a different way than most of us do.”

Then again, maybe it’s only battle-scarred New Yorkers who need Baradaran’s brand of spiritual therapy. “This is about the moments we share with a driver, whose experience is usually isolated from ours," the artist says. "Taxi drivers told me that if someone says hello to them upon getting into the cab, they immediately know that person is not a New Yorker. That says a lot, doesn’t it?”